Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  It wasn’t Oscar. It was his father, Marlin Scott, projecting himself as he would once have looked, a young, hale and healthy man. Albeit a green and flickering holographic one.

  “You have been so accommodating, Director,” Scott’s hologram said with sincerity. “Providing me with the power plant, giving me overrides to all drones, complete black-cloth as far as Cabal’s knowledge of the project goes. I really could not have achieved my aims without your help. I am truly grateful. I know your intentions were noble; you have a family to consider after all. But I’m afraid here on the final day, it is time for me to put falsehoods aside, and you, my dear, are my last loose end to tie up.”

  Marlin Scott had been the scientist who approached Coldwater with this proposition? I stared at her. He had made these faceless creatures, filled with God knows what disease? Tortured the Pale here in his own private playground? True, he had, after all, been one of the original team working on the Sentinel project. He had prior knowledge of creating GOs. But why?

  “What have you done, Marlin?” Coldwater said. “You’ve lied to me about all of this. You’ve lied about everything.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid he rather has,” Chase said.

  “You have about five seconds to explain yourself,” Coldwater said coolly, “before I call this in and bring the full force of Cabal down on your head. What have you been doing?”

  The green image smiled sarcastically.

  “Call it in? And implicate yourself? How noble of you, Felicity,” he said. “You think you will send Cabal to arrest me? Questions would be asked, your daring and frankly ill-advised faith in me and funding would be dragged into the light. As would the truth about that gibbering monster you keep in a hole under Blue Lab. He would be destroyed. You would be destroyed.”

  I glanced at Coldwater. She was glaring at the screen with barely controlled fury. “You underestimate me if you think I would risk the safety of the people of New Oxford to save my own skin…or even my son’s,” she said. “I put my trust in you, Scott, in good faith. You’ve been lying to me?”

  Scott rolled his eyes, the smile dropping from his face. “You’re a tiresome fool,” he said. “But I thought you might be, which is why I’ve just remotely disabled your phone. The entire Harcourt site is now offline for comms.” The hologram leaned in to screen a little. “Nobody is calling anything in. No whistleblowing. And nobody knows you are here, do they, my dear? I doubt very much you told your colleagues you were just nipping out of the city to an illegally arranged secret laboratory and to hold your calls, am I right?”

  Coldwater gripped her phone so tightly I thought it might shatter in her hand.

  “We know she’s here,” I said, stepping toward the screen. Scott regarded me with displeasure, staring down greenly from the screen like the Great Oz.

  “Yes, I know you,” he said. “The troublesome doctor from Blue Lab. You’re always sniffing around my son. Really, Doctor, I must applaud you. You have more lives than a cat. I am actually getting bored of trying to kill you.” He smiled a little. “This last time should do it though.”

  He looked out of the screen as Kane stepped up to my side, placing a large and reassuring hand on my shoulder.

  “Oh and look, you brought an attack dog with you.” Scott’s lip curled. “Tribal filth. How wonderful. I couldn’t have planned this better myself. Talk about three birds with one stone.” He glanced at Chase, still sitting on the end of the bed. “I’ve no idea who you are, boy, but it makes no difference. You’re in the wrong crowd. Bad luck for you. None of you will leave here tonight anyway.”

  Cloves stepped forward, her arms folded. “If you’re planning on killing us all, you owe us an explanation,” she said. “What’s the game plan, Scott, you batty old bastard? You’re the richest man alive. You have everything you want. What use do you have for developing biological weapons?”

  Scott considered for a moment. Around us, the Pale breathed in their comas, rattling background noise.

  “It’s really quite simple,” he said. “I am dying.”

  He shrugged. “I’m old. I’ve lived a long life, I’ve seen the fall of the old world and the rise of this new mockery of it. We’ve been forced to share our world with these…animals. The vampires, the beastmen. It’s abhorrent. An abomination of the natural order. Humanity has fallen so far from the top of the food chain.” He breathed a deep sigh. “I had a hand in creating the Pale.” He glanced at me. “As did your dear daddy. We made such a terrible, terrible mess of things.”

  He lifted his chin. “I aim to put things right before I die.”

  “How do you propose to do that?” Coldwater said. “You told me you were able to develop a cure. For the GOs, for the Pale. You said you were going to heal the world.”

  “And I am,” he said. “Perhaps I lied by omission to you, but I have indeed developed a cure. The ultimate cure. Imagine if you can a world without the Pale, but not just that.” He held up a finger, excited. “A world without vampires or Tribals or Bonewalkers. All the monsters gone. Imagine mankind rising once more to the centre of his own destiny, taking back the flame of civilisation and dragging us from this pathetic new Dark Age, where we cower behind our walls.”

  “Beautiful rhetoric,” Chase Pargate clapped his hands sarcastically. “But dress it up as you wish, Mr Marlin Scott, you’re still talking about genocide here. Wiping out whole species in their entirety. A way to kill all GOs, everywhere? I never thought it even possible. Honestly…they call me mad?”

  “I never used to believe it were possible either,” Scott said to us all. “But when one is as close to death as I am, one begins to search in earnest, even in the most unlikely of places for an answer. Back through history, at those who have tried to understand these monsters before.”

  “The Voynich manuscript?” I said.

  Scott smiled. “Roger Bacon,” he said, admiration in his voice. “You have been doing your homework, Doctor. I’m impressed. Imagine it. All those centuries ago, a genius of his time, aware of the shadowy world of monsters we now call GOs, back when few else even believed they existed. Studying these creatures, investigating them, finding out what makes them tick. He was a true scientist, a champion of mankind. The manuscript he left behind, in all its maddening complexity, contains so much more than you or I can ever imagine. But what chiefly interested me, is that it described how GOs were made.” His face darkened. “And how they might be un-made. Their vulnerabilities.”

  “You hired the professor, Knight, to translate the document for you, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Scott admitted freely. “He was most eager to unlock its secrets. He did such sterling work too. Even with my scientific background from the sentinel project, I never could have developed the Pestilence, as I have named my GO-apocalypse virus, not without his help. I always insist on using the best people in all areas of my business. He was perhaps the only man alive in what remains of our civilisation who could decipher Bacon’s arcane scribbling for me.”

  “And Amanda Bishop?” I asked. “Another of the best people in her field?”

  “Bishop was a prodigy,” Scott said. “Her work in genetics brought her to my attention some time ago. We had approached her of course, tried to bring her into the fold, into this project of mine.” He looked disappointed. “But she was an idealist. She wanted to finish school first, take up teaching perhaps.” He looked amused. “As you can imagine, I am not a man used to being refused. So I made her an offer she couldn’t. An obscene amount of future funding for whatever discipline she eventually settled into, in exchange for her assistance first in my own private project. Putting into real action what we had discovered from Knight’s translation of the manuscript. Under my direction, Bishop formed a small team. Her and five of her best students from the Jenner.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “They exceeded my every expectation. Working with the data we had translated, from religious and ancient ramblings into modern medicine and science. T
hey helped me develop the beautiful creatures you see before you, our faceless hosts.”

  “Hosts?” I said, glancing at the naked creatures suspended in the liquid.

  “The beings you see floating in embryonic fluid here are shells, you see,” Scott explained. “The Pestilence which Bacon’s work described, a plague which would wipe out any species it was tailored to, could not be grown in a simple Petri dish. It was a parasite, a living thing in its own right. It needs living tissue to flourish and incubate. So I made new. Simple enough.”

  “Why would Amanda Bishop help you destroy a race of people, you obscene madman?” Coldwater barked. “You say she was an idealist, I hardly think it likely she would turn a blind eye to what you were doing just because you waved money in her face. People are not that shallow, not in real life.”

  Scott looked coldly at the director. “Well, the money helps, of course. Funding is so hard to come by these days for young scientists like dear Amanda, and everyone has a price. Everyone. I have always found that it is usually disappointingly low. But yes, you are very perceptive, Felicity. For an extra push, and to ensure her…cooperation, I also promised not to expose her as a fetishistic, vampire-loving Helsing. She was a true academic you see. Brilliant reputation, bright future, spotless history. But I knew what she truly was, what…” His lip curled in distaste, “…vile perversions…she was involved in with those monsters.”

  He looked at each of us in turn. “You think I am a senile old coot? That I don’t know what goes on right under my own nose?” He seemed to take a moment to compose himself before he continued, in a low, grim tone. “I am no fool. I know what my son is. He thinks he hides it from me, but he’s fooling no one. He has been perverted by these creatures, these vampires. I’d assigned him a new personal driver, one whom I hired and who would report directly back to me, without my son’s knowledge. Call me overprotective if you will. But I wanted to know where he went, whom he saw. Parents will do anything for their children.” His eyes rolled to Coldwater. “Isn’t that true, Felicity?”

  “You spied on your son,” she said.

  “I discovered my worst fears were true. That he has soiled his own humanity by allowing himself to be…used…by these undead abominations.”

  Scott looked furious. “Imagine my luck when my driver, my spy at my son’s elbow, also captured Amanda Bishop frequenting the vampire clubs. Such a boon, just the leverage I needed. Of course, she swallowed the same nonsense as dear Director Coldwater here. People are so eager to rationalise things they are uncomfortable doing. We were working toward a cure.” He shrugged, making his image flicker. “It’s true in a way. But what we are curing is the situation, not the condition.”

  “You killed them,” Coldwater said. “In cold blood. Once they’d served their purpose, they were disposable to you, weren’t they? You killed Dr Bishop and Professor Knight.”

  Scott raised his hands into view on the screen, palms up in contrite confession. “I don’t like loose ends,” he said. “They even managed to smuggle one of my precious hosts out of here and back to the city. I believe they intended to present it to the authorities as proof of my plan, hanging themselves out to dry in the process. How sickeningly noble of them. Martyrs both. I put an end to them however, before they could do any such thing. Lamentable, but I have always been one to turn a bad situation to my advantage.”

  “But you lost your host,” I said. “The one they smuggled out of here. That’s one loose end you couldn’t tie up. We found it in the river. It’s been causing quite a stir at Blue Lab.”

  “Indeed. I didn’t know where the old fool had hidden it, and he wouldn’t say, even under…persuasion. Stashing it under Folly Bridge.” He shook his head in disbelief. “What a fool. He probably thought he was being poetic.”

  “You killed the driver too, didn’t you?” I said. “The third victim of the Portmeadow killings, Mr King. Oscar told me he’d recognised his picture on the news. Was that his only crime, that he knew a little too much? You think you can just sentence people to death for being inconvenient?”

  Scott’s eyes were cold and utterly uncaring. It was deeply unsettling. His projection looked so like Oscar. “That bothersome driver was the only person who would have caused me problems. He had helped me secure Amanda Bishop into my project. He might have got a little nervous when her body suddenly washed up. I couldn’t risk him running to the authorities when the corpse was finally discovered, which was inevitable. A bought man can never truly be trusted to be loyal. As I’ve said, I don’t leave loose ends.”

  “You are the worst kind of monster, Scott,” Kane said, through gritted teeth. “You made these murders, your murders, look like the work of my people.”

  Scott stared at the Tribal leader. “People expect monstrous acts from monsters,” he spat. “Collateral damage. We are at war, humanity, a war which we must win, and sacrifices have to be made. Even human lives.”

  I suspected if Scott had been physically present in the room with us, Kane would have torn his throat out before he could utter another word. As it was, all the Tribal leader could do was glare at the screen, every hair on his head bristling.

  “It serves my purpose to whip the good people of Oxford into support for the Mankind Movement and all we stand for, to see the beasts and monsters for the danger they truly represent. I thought it couldn’t hurt to turn the tide of public opinion against you, to turn the people against the Tribals with a little stage dressing on my part. And it would help humanity recover after the Pestilence Project was complete and you, and all of your debased kind, were finally gone from our city.”

  He narrowed his eyes, glancing again at Coldwater. “For who would mourn the death of a monster?”

  “You’re the monster, Scott,” Coldwater said. “You’re a serial killer. Five are dead, in cold blood, if not by your hand, then at your direction, and all to keep your secrets.”

  “More than five,” Kane said. “The two of my clan I sent to investigate these killings. And the two vampires too, which the bloodsucker sent. There are more than human corpses to lay at this murderer’s door.”

  “Now that, I have to admit, that was a most fortunate development,” Scott said with evident pleasure. “As you can see from the specimens around you, I needed test subjects for the Pestilence, Pale subjects to work with, to ensure the Pestilence was tailored to their particular physiology. But when we encountered Tribals in the Labyrinth tunnels, sniffing after us, well, one does not look a gift horse in the mouth. The initial infection proved rather…” He waved a hand in the air, “unpredictable. Not dead, but mad. Stark, raving feral. They came in handy when I loosed them on this meddling doctor in the library. Everyone in the city was suspecting insane Tribals were behind the murders anyway. I thought it wise to give them the proof they wanted. Harkness was sniffing around the Radcliffe, looking into Bacon, getting a little too close for comfort. It was easy enough to release my creature in through the Labyrinth entrance. I didn’t know she had a vampire with her. They always complicate things. She should have been dog food.”

  “As for the vampires your precious Clan Master sent, well, again, we tried initially to subdue them too. I would love to have a few fanged beasts to play with. But we all know from the incident last year what happens when a vampire is injected with Epsilon. They explode like piñatas. We had to water the tranquiliser down, mix the medicine with a version of my Pestilence.”

  “You’ve been using my Epsilon to sedate these things?” I asked, staring around at the Pale. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That was how he’d overpowered Kane and Allesandro’s agents. With my own solution. Scott raised his green, holographic eyebrows. “Pretty much constantly pumping them with it,” he said. “There’s more Epsilon in the prone bodies of the Pale around you than there is blood, and we can still barely keep the creatures compliant. They’re feisty, I’ll give that to the Pale.”

  I felt sick.

  “Once we had the genetic information we ne
eded, I disposed of the vampires as well, of course.” Scott nodded. “They didn’t go mad as the Tribals had. They simply died. I could have left them here, but call me superstitious, I wanted rid of them. The creatures of the night seem to have a lot of mind tricks. I didn’t want the Clan Master and his cronies ‘feeling’ us out here, tracing me to my little power plant by the presence of their miserable corpses.”

  “I was right,” I said. “They were in the car bomb.”

  “Indeed,” Scott said, looking at me irritably, as though it was rude of me not to have died as intended. “You should have died there and then, Doctor Harkness. I wanted to make you into a martyr for the cause. The Tribals would be blamed, as they would for the killings. As I’ve said, you have proved very hard to kill. You avoided the carbomb, you escaped my mad infected Tribals. I thought I’d sealed you away for good when I sent my Bonewalker to apprehend you at the museum. You have become my personal bad penny.”

  “How did you know we were there?”

  “Because my son is an idiot,” he snapped. “His own driver is dead, lamentably. He took my car. Do you really think my own driver would not inform me that my son was taking a midnight trip to the museum? There was only one reason you could be going there. I buried you. My wayward son I had brought home safely locked away in his own quarters. Safe from you and your bad influences. I will deal with him tomorrow.”

  He glared at me. “And yet here you are again. You simply won’t lie down and die, will you?”

  “Sorry,” I replied. “Selfish of me. What have you done with the students, the remainder of Amanda Bishop’s team?”