“Lady, if you’ll follow me this way, your men will be taken care of.”
The trafficker motioned with his hand once again. Denholme and the Hound were led away from Helena towards the other side of the room. The smugglers are in safe hands, thought Helena.
The trader bowed disdainfully with a curling smile on his lips. As he came back up he said, “If you would like to come with me I shall do my best to ensure your complete satisfaction.”
She nearly laughed, but controlled herself and nodded her acquiescence.
He was more than a foot shorter than Helena; the guard who followed them as they left the room through a small steel door was even smaller. She could sense, from both his body language and his scent, that he would be a capable opponent who was undaunted by her presence.
She reflected, sadly, that his confidence was either because he did not realise who and what she was or because he regarded himself more highly than he should. The deaths she’d caused weighed heavily on her, threatening to overturn her emotions with each reminder. His passive aggression made her fingers itch with memory, like a grenade that had exploded in her stomach but continued to tick with the promise of further damage.
She couldn’t see high technology, or any traces of implants, which could give him the speed or strength to take her on. At his side was holstered a high calibre pistol. A bulge just above his belt line indicated where another gun was tucked into his trousers. Hardly state of the art, she thought.
She guessed he was more aroused by her presence than worried. He was in his early twenties, at least a century her junior. He would never have seen anyone like her. Helena was used to her own appearance; a hundred years of her face in the mirror every morning no longer caused her to stop and reflect. Helena could feel the pressure of the bodyguard’s gaze, the lack of any other women in the bunker highlighting the structure of the society she was in. The guard was not keeping an eye on her in order to make sure she caused no trouble. He was not worried enough for that. He was simply scoping her out, checking the shape of her legs and breasts.
He wouldn’t know where to start, she thought, hoping it was true.
They came at last to a small office, hidden deep in concrete walls. Her maps told her she was still beneath the high-rise buildings; they had not needed to go far to escape Indexiv.
The room was five metres square, as bare-walled as the garage they had come from. The concrete had begun to crumble from old age. The ceiling was damp which infested the air with a foetid smell.
Why has the boss chosen this room as his office? asked her AI.
“Sorry for the smell,” he muttered. He was of ancient sub-Saharan stock; his skin a glistening ebony under the cheap, buzzing lights. His eyes were pitch with wide white sclera. From his position as negotiator and the fact that he had his own room, Helena took the trader to be the leader of the outfit.
“I doubt my imperial master knows much regarding the production of Leak,” he continued. “Suffice to say that the areas being used to prepare the product, even when it is cut with impurities, must be absolutely clean. Our operatives work in clean suits and the air is dry.” He lazily motioned towards the damp circles at the top of the room. “That would be a problem for us.” His voice was a harsh whisper cut through with a deeper timbre that could have been sickness or simply tiredness.
The room had a small cot in it, along with a number of chairs surrounding a single large slab of stone that was placed on top of several recovered breeze blocks. There was no sign of medical equipment nor computational facilities.
How are they going to guarantee I hand over any nanomachines, let alone the correct number?
“Would my prestigious ruler like a contract or will she accept my word regarding her nanomachines?” There was a glint of defiance in his eyes. Helena let the insults roll over her. Both of them knew she was desperate, she wouldn’t be there if there were any alternative. The Normal was making the most of his rare chance to treat her with the contempt he felt towards her kind. That she was a woman only encouraged him. The depth and intensity of his distaste surprised Helena. The history books were clear in the benefits the Oligarchs had ushered in. No major wars for three hundred years, no one starved. No one was oppressed, education was free and people were able to do as they wished so long as they didn’t harm others. Helena knew all this, so this man’s resentment mystified her.
How would you describe Noenieput then? asked her AI.
Indexiv will be stopped, she thought. They are an exception to the rule.
You’re not one for irony are you, it said.
Helena told it to be quiet. “I will take your word,” she said out loud to the trader.
“As you wish,” said the smuggler.
They left the room, heading back to the garage. A few metres from the office the smuggler laid his hand against the concrete wall, digging his fingers into niches she had not seen on passing the first time.
There is more going on here than you think, came the unbidden comment from her AI.
What do you mean? She asked it.
You’re being watched and recorded. They have access to technologies that are officially restricted. Guard yourself.
Helena let her vision extend into the broader electromagnetic spectrum, instructing her Secondary AI to add an artificial filter to the data she would receive so that she could make sense of it.
Filter out noise and only leave the patterns to be expected from manmade technologies. Almost immediately, she was aware of a number of fields that signified superconducting generators, whose characteristic complexes of energy were unmistakable. They spread through the air in front of her like phosphorescent spider webs, penetrating the walls all around. They originated from further below and, as a side of wall sank back into darkness in response to the smuggler’s pressure on the indentations, she guessed they would be descending towards the source.
Over the blue arcing through the air, whose origin was superconduction, she could also sense a number of other patterns, possibly related to plasma and fission technologies. What worried her most was that she could see soft pinks and lilacs, colours her AI associated with the extremely weak and narrow fields typically generated by machines on the nanoscale. While the small number of machines she would be depositing represented no real gain for her new friends, she was concerned that she might be adding to an already existing cache.
For a moment, she wondered whether she could actually compromise her belief that Normals should not be given unlimited access to nanotechnology. Except she’d already decided. If she refused to cooperate she’d never see the sun again.
Faced with what she knew were two bad choices, she knew she had to hand over the nanomachines. If the gang already had access to such technology then whatever she gave them would not be their introduction to prohibited technology. Furthermore, since she couldn’t act to ensure the machines’ destruction, she had to assume the worst; that the smugglers would be able to detect, even able to deactivate any program she might leave to try sabotage her payment.
She could afford to take no further precautions.
They descended two dozen steps to a sturdy metallic door. She could not see much through it; it was steel with no newer technologies such as biopolymers and organic steel hybrids. The smuggler held his hand up to a basic print reader and the door clicked itself open, swinging back with the deep note of low friction joints exercising their edges against one another. On the other side was a short tunnel made from concertinaed plastic which ended at another door after two metres. They were going through an airlock.
Into the clean rooms, thought Helena.
Once the first door was shut, the smuggler opened a small cabinet contained in the wall of the airlock and handed Helena a pair of gloves.
“I’m an Oligarch,” was all she said. He looked at her and then at the gloves.
“Perfection, of course,” and placed them back into the cupboard.
He dressed himself, covering his sho
es, head and hands.
Helena took her shoes off. The air was cool against her toes; she let it swirl between them for a few moments before following the trafficker.
The smuggler unlatched the second door. Ducking low to clear the doorway, Helena stepped into a chamber that smelt of the highest mountain. The air was dry and empty, almost like her home. The room was arranged as a small factory; from her vantage point at the top of three stairways that led down onto the shop floor, Helena could see the whole process in one glance. From the near left of the room, moving away from her and then looping back around in a series of tables and stills, the raw crop was taken, boiled down and then dried out. The whole procedure took place in sealed pressure cookers, the moisture being extracted via aluminium pipes that left through the ceiling. It was labour intensive, more than thirty men and women were working, with four of them at the end of the process managing the packaging.
The only clothes that any of them wore were gloves and face masks: the former to avoid their contaminating the product, the latter to stop them succumbing to the drug’s effects. The cheapest method of ensuring the workers’ honesty was to leave them naked and completely shaved. This way none of them could leave with unpermitted gifts of Leak, or accidentally contaminate the product. The lighting in the room was a light blue, soft and cold. The Leak itself was a pale azure and so was starkly visible under the light.
How much do they produce here? She knew the Southern States manufactured huge amounts of Leak, but the refinery was an eye opener. How is it actually grown?
At least one source of superconductivity was evident: a small generator that probably provided power to the entire facility. It was isolated from the power sources that supplied the city. Even the most perceptive orbital satellite wouldn’t pick up the telltale energy signatures produced by a powerful device when it was this far below ground.
The trafficker led her through the centre of the room. None of the workers looked up. Her AI told her that they themselves were tanked up on perception reducing drugs in order to help them concentrate on their individual tasks for longer. They would be unlikely to notice her if she went up to them and shouted in their ears.
The room immediately adjacent was a small medical centre, with enough advanced and restricted technology to make Helena pause.
Who would supply all of this? she asked herself. There was another superconducting engine along with a number of smaller plasma powered instruments, most of which were unlikely to be used in medical procedures. A cooling device, powered with a small fission based power source was hidden behind a thin facade, but her Tertiary AI could detect alpha particles escaping from a small hairline crack in its casing. Her primary AI estimated its safe lifespan at less than six months.
Are the smugglers aware of the dangers lurking in their cobbled-together collection of high technology?
They have more pressing concerns and risks to attend to, said her AI.
The smuggler indicated a storage facility. Carefully lifting the lid, he angled a pair of steel tongs to remove a small container from the steaming interior.
He placed it on a small polymer mat, touched a small switch and the pod unsealed itself. “Mistress, if you will kindly do as you have agreed.”
Helena let her hand hover over the open cylinder, the ten thousand dropped off her body into the liquid nitrogen coolant. She pulled her hand back; the trafficker snapped the lid shut.
“It is not that we distrust our illustrious leaders, but excuse me for a moment.” He shovelled the container onto a small metal shelf and turned to a computer display. A figure came up, showing the mass of the container. He waited and then, apparently satisfied, picked the cylinder up with the tongs and slotted it back into the fridge.
“It is a pleasure doing business with you.” He thought for a moment. “You can go now, wherever it is you are going. We know Indexiv are seeking you, but they shall not learn of your whereabouts from us.” This last was said as a threat, his tone clear that if she were to make use of the information gained in discovering the Leak factory in the centre of Windhoek, Indexiv would know she’d been there and where she was going.
Of course, she thought, we are being taken to Swakupmund. The smugglers would know their exact location.
IT WASN’T LONG before they were back in the garage. Denholme and the Hound had been fed. They were lounging along with a number of the smugglers.
The pilot looked uncomfortable. He had probably spent some of his career in the Navy hunting down smuggling rings. Rex was more at ease, letting the others do the talking.
He perked up when he noticed her arrival. The traffickers gradually, but purposefully, moved away. By the time she stood with her team, they had been quietly left alone. Helena anxiously hoped they’d learned nothing about her from the traffickers.
She felt sure Denholme would have asked for news of the wider world but had no chance to ask him.
The smugglers had agreed to deposit them at the outskirts of Swakupmund. The town was so small that they would need less than half a day to search the place for the Euros facility. She doubted Indexiv would have made their presence felt in such an insignificant place, unless they knew precisely where he was. She felt confident Schmerl had been lying when he’d claimed that Indexiv knew the location of the boy, otherwise there would have been no reason for her uncle, or half the available regiments, to take it upon themselves to find her and extract the datastore.
The smuggler’s leader bid them a terse farewell. He and Helena both knew she wasn’t coming back. If she found what she was looking for, he could keep his precious collection of nanomachines. If she failed, it was because she was dead.
THEY WERE PILED into an ancient, wheezing alcohol fuelled helicopter. She could have laughed. The machine was so obvious, noisy, useless and vulnerable that a child’s pot shot would have ended everything.
The scenery between Windhoek and the coast was barren, like the surface of Mars. The desert and scrub was lush compared to the Martian landscape, but the shapes with their eerie patterns carved into the land by millennia of unrelenting weather reminded her of the red planet’s starkness. The only visible signs of life were termite cities standing like arcane citadels in the wilderness. Herds of antelope could be seen nosing between sparse clumps of bush.
The coast, when it appeared, broke itself upon the harsh edge of the Atlantic. The deeply green ocean subdued the land with relentless white breakers. Helena relished hearing them, in spite of all that was waiting for them when they landed.
They saw the town from a few kilometres out. A short journey south would bring them into Walvis Bay, an old town that was slightly more than a blip on the map. Swakupmund was a slight, low built affair, which had seen better days as it ran down the gentle slope of land into the sea.
Anything that could be called well maintained was situated close to the water. The stone buildings that lined the seafront sat huddled behind the barriers placed there to ward off the threat of the rising sea from two hundred years before. A broad dry riverbed ran to the south of the town. It was lush with vegetation, suggesting something still moved beneath the parched surface.
Helena checked the datastore; nothing happened. The Hound seemed on edge. Denholme frequently checked on Helena, as if he was afraid she would disappear at any moment. She had barely spoken to the pilot since they had been reunited. Nothing they were about to do gave her reason to encourage him. Helena had decided during the flight that she would see to it that his family would be well rewarded for his part in this mission.
She motioned for the pilot of the chopper to drop them off about a kilometre from the edge of the town. It wouldn’t make them any less conspicuous to observers on the ground but she wished the smugglers to know as little as possible about what they were doing and why.
Minutes later the three of them were alone, the chopper a fading whump of rotors to the east. Rex turned to Helena, waiting; she was the guide to the next part of his hunt.
“Where do we start?” she asked him.
He frowned, “You have the tools to find my destination.” Seeing the appraising look she gave him, he said “Don’t plan on misleading or escaping me. I will kill you both.” Helena nearly laughed to see him make such contradictory statements. She asked her AI to prepare a contingency should he attempt either to kill her or to leave her behind once they had located the child.
Denholme looked as if he would rather be anywhere else than in Southern Africa. She understood how he felt.
She pulled the datastore out. It did nothing and Helena worried that it might not do anything ever again. If so, she was stuck. Her AI asked how she thought she was going to get to London and she shrugged: one problem at a time.
There was nothing for it but to head towards town. The global positioning coordinates she’d been given lay a few hundred metres north of the town centre. She hoped that something would happen if and when they got within a few steps of the location.
But something was wrong. Rex was sniffing noisily at the air with his head perched at an angle on the end of his neck like a nervous meerkat.
She had not managed to grab more than a few pieces of fruit as they left Windhoek and was still famished. Still, she wanted to extend her senses out and try to catch whatever it was the Hound had picked up.
“Oh God,” said Denholme, Helena turned to see what it was. He was staring into town. She followed his gaze, swiftly logging the drifting clouds of smoke over the town. Nearer to hand, the roofs of the closest buildings were smouldering, in many places collapsed.
It was only then Helena saw what had made Denholme cry out. A small child lay at the foot of the nearest wall. Smeared up the wall, mixing together as it dried in the warming morning, were the child’s brains and blood. He had been killed by smashing his head against the wall until his skull split open. Whoever had done it would have needed to hold him by the feet and swing him with their arms outstretched. Helena suspected his arms would also have been broken as the child tried to protect itself.
A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1 Page 16
