Gen took one of the vases from the ancient oak dresser, and went off to the bathroom for some water. Louise datavised her net connection server and inquired if there were any messages for her. The six-hourly ritual.
Pointless, as the server would automatically deliver any communiqué as soon as it received one.
There were no messages. Specifically, no messages from Tranquillity.
Louise flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling as she tried to puzzle it out. She knew she’d got the message protocol right; that was part of the NAS2600 communication program. Something had to be wrong at the other end. But when she put the news hound into primary mode, there was no report of anything untoward happening to Tranquillity. Perhaps Joshua simply wasn’t there, and her messages were piling up in his net server memory.
She thought about it for a while, then composed a brief message to Ione Saldana herself. Joshua said he knew her, they’d grown up together. If anybody knew where he was, she would.
After that, she launched a quick directory search and datavised detective Brent Roi.
“Kavanagh?” he replied. “God, you mean you bought yourself a set of neural nanonics?”
“Yes, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”
“No, but I thought your planet didn’t allow you that kind of technology.”
“I’m not on Norfolk now.”
“Yeah, right. So what the hell do you want?” he asked.
“I’d like to go to Tranquillity, please. I don’t know who I have to get permission from.”
“From me, I’m your case officer. And you can’t.”
“Why not? I thought you wanted us to leave Earth. If we got to Tranquillity, you wouldn’t have to worry about us any more.”
“Frankly, I don’t worry about you now, Miss Kavanagh. You seem to be behaving yourself—at least, you haven’t tripped any of our monitor programs.”
Louise wondered if he knew about the bugs Andy had removed at Jude’s Eworld. She wasn’t going to volunteer the information. “So why can’t I go?”
“I gather you haven’t got the hang of your news hound program yet.”
“I have.”
“Really. Then you ought know that as of oh-five-seventeen hours GMT, the global vac-train network was shut down by an emergency Presidential executive decree. Every arcology is on its own. The President’s office says they want to prevent the possessed in Paris and Edmonton from sneaking into more arcologies. Myself, I think it’s a load of crap, but the President is scared of public opinion more than he is of the possessed. So like I told you before, you’re on Earth for the duration.”
“Already?” she whispered aloud. So much for Govcentral moving slowly. But Robson had been right again. “There must be a way out of London to the tower,” she datavised.
“Only the vac-trains.”
“But how long will this go on for?”
“Ask the President. He forgot to tell me.”
“I see. Well, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. You want some advice? You have finite funds, right? You might consider shunting along to a different hotel. And if this goes on for much longer, which I suspect it will, you’ll need a job.”
“A job?”
“Yeah, that’s one of those nasty little things ordinary people do, and in return they get given money by their employer.”
“There’s no need to be rude.”
“Eat it. When you apply to the local Burrow Burger as a waitress, or whatever, they’ll want your citizenship number. Refer them to me, I’ll grant you temporary immigrant status.”
“Thank you.” That much sarcasm couldn’t be carried along a datavise, but he’d know.
“Hey, if you don’t fancy that, at least you’ve got an alternative. A girl like you won’t have any trouble finding a man to look after her.”
“Detective Roi, can I ask what happened to Fletcher?”
“No, you can’t.” The link ended.
Louise looked out of the window across Green Park. Dark clouds swirled over the dome, hiding the sun. She wondered who’d sent them.
It was a forty-storey octagonal tower in the Dalston district, one of eight similar structures that made up the Parsonage Heights development.
They were supposed to raise the general tone of the neighbourhood, encumbered as it was by low-cost housing, bargain centre market halls, and a benefits-reliant population. The towers were supposed to rest on a huge underground warren of factory and light manufacturing units. Above that buzzing industrial core, the first seven floors would be given over to retail outlets, followed by five floors of leisure industry premises, three more floors of professional and commercial offices, and the remaining floors taken up by residential apartments. The whole entity would be an economic heart transplant for Dalston, creating opportunity and invigorating the maze of shabby ancient streets outside with rivers of commerce and new money.
But Dalston’s underlying clay had a water-table problem which would have tripled the cost of the underground factory warren in order to prevent it from flooding, so it was downgraded to a couple of levels of storage warehousing. The local market halls cut their rock bottom prices still further, leaving half of the retail units unrented; franchise chains took over a meagre eight per cent of the designated leisure floorspace. In order to recoup their investment, Voynow Finance hurriedly converted the thirty upper floors into comfortable apartments with a reasonable view across the Westminster Dome, which market research indicated they could sell to junior and middle management executive types.
The rushed compromise worked, after a fashion. Certainly, sixty years after its construction, Parsonage Heights was home to a slightly more affluent class than Dalston’s average. There were even some reasonable shops and cafés established on the lower floors—though what activities went on in the dilapidated, damp, and crumbling warehouses hidden beneath was something the top-floor residents declined to investigate.
The local police station knew there was a Light Bringer coven down there; but for whatever reason, the chief constable had never instituted a raid.
So when Banneth’s tube train pulled in at Dalston Kingsland station, the magus and a fifteen-strong bodyguard was waiting with impunity on the platform to greet her. She took one look at the blank-faced young toughs carrying their pathetic assortment of inferior weapons, and had trouble preventing a laugh.
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The Dalston coven magus stepped forwards, and bowed slightly. “High Magus, it’s an honour to have you here. We have your safe house ready.”
“It better be a good one, or I’ll have you strapped down on your own altar and demonstrate how we deal with people who fail God’s Brother in Edmonton.”
The magus’s vaguely hopeful air wafted away, leaving behind a belligerent expression. “You won’t be able to fault us. Our position hasn’t been compromised.”
She ignored the crude reference. “Lead on.”
The bodyguard clumped their way noisily up the carbon-concrete stairs and out onto Kingston High Street. The first four out of the station’s automatic door levelled their TIP carbines along the road, which startled the few late-night pedestrians heading home from the district’s grotty clubs. They swept their muzzles round in what they thought was a professional scanning manoeuvre.
“Clear!” the leader barked.
Banneth rolled her eyes as the rest of the bodyguard hurried out around her. Cars had been halted in the street to let them cross. They hurried into the ground floor mall of the Parsonage Heights tower opposite the station. Three more sect members were waiting inside, standing guard beside an open lift. The magus and eight bodyguards crowded in around Banneth. They rode it to the top floor, where it opened out directly into the penthouse vestibule. More sect memb
ers were inside, toting their weapons and finishing off the new security sensor array.
“No fucker’s going to sneak up on you while you’re here,” the magus said confidently. “We’ve got every approach covered. There’ll be guards outside, and in all the stairwells. Nobody gets in or out without a secure access code, which you have command authority over.”
Banneth walked into the penthouse, which occupied the whole fortieth floor. The absent owner had chosen its decor straight out of a thirty-year-old catalogue file specialising in unashamed chintz: green leather furniture, Turkish rugs over polished marble tiles, glowing primary-colour sketches hanging on the walls, and a red marble fireplace complete with holographic flames. A glass wall had swing-up slab doors which led out to a roof garden with a swimming pool and hot tub; the sun loungers were sculpted blue plastic frogs.
“The fridge is full,” the magus said. “If you take a fancy to anything, just let us know and we’ll have it sent up. I can get anything you need. My grip on this town is total.”
“I’m sure,” Banneth said. “You, you, and you,” her finger singled out two attractive girls and a teenage boy. “Stay. The rest of you, fuck off. Now.”
The magus blushed heavily. Treating him like a piece of street shit in front of his acolytes would be a serious blow to his authority. She stared right at him, a silent direct challenge.
He snapped his fingers, gesturing everyone out, then stomped through the big blackwood doors without looking back.
“Dump the guns,” Banneth told the three remaining acolytes. “You won’t be needing them in here.”
After a moment’s hesitation they left them beside the kitchen bar.
Banneth walked out into the small paved garden. Night fuchsias spilled their sweetness into the air. It had a balcony of high, one-way glass, allowing her to look over the glimmering crater of lights which defined the city. Nobody could see in. A reasonable protection against snipers, she acknowledged.
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“Shit,” Banneth mumbled. She beckoned the nervous acolytes out onto the roof garden. “One, find me a decent glass of Crown whisky; then take your clothes off. I want to watch you swimming.”
“Um, High Magus,” one of the girls said anxiously. “I can’t swim.”
“Then you’d better learn fast. Hadn’t you?”
Banneth ignored their whispering behind her, and looked upwards. Long strips of faintly luminescent cloud curved round the dome, breaking into agitated foam as they hit the surface flow boundary. Patches of night sky were visible through the choppy fringes. Stars and spacecraft shone bright against the blackness. There was the hint of a hazy ark above the northern horizon.
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Banneth glanced out over the preserved city again. The first pale grey photons of dawn were slipping up from the eastern horizon to lap against the bottom of the giant crystal dome. She wondered how many more dawns she was going to see.
Truthful estimate, knowing the way she’d put Dexter together, no more than a week.
The acolytes were splashing about in the pool now, including the non-swimming girl clinging resolutely to the shallow end. Banneth didn’t care, the whole point was just to see their great young bodies glistening wet. Indulging herself with them was definitely one-up on the customary last meal. However, there were files stored in her neural nanonics which had to be edited and prepared. Her lifetime’s work. She could hardly allow it to go to waste, though finding an institution that would accept it might prove difficult. It wasn’t just that she wanted it preserved, she wanted it studied, utilized. An important body of knowledge: human behaviour under the kind of extreme conditions that would forever remain closed to academic medical circles. It was unique, which made it all the more valuable. Perhaps some day it might become a classic reference for psychology students.
She went back into the lounge and settled into one of the dreadful green leather couches, ready to start indexing the files. It would be amusing to see how long the acolytes stayed in the water.
The Lancini had been built at the start of the Twenty-first Century, a huge department store intended to rival London’s best: set on Millbank overlooking the Thames, it had a très chic view which along with its retro-thirties decor was calculated to bring in the affluent and curious alike. As with all outsize endeavours, its decline was never going to be swift. It had limped along for decades with falling customer numbers and negative profits. The image it attempted to foster right from the start was dignity without snobbishness. According to the market survey programs worshiped by its executives, such a policy would attract older shoppers, with their correspondingly larger credit funds. Floor managers, left with no margin for innovation, kept ordering established, unhip, brands to serve their loyal, ageing shoppers. Every year, fewer of them returned.
The execs really should have known that; if they’d just cross-linked their market surveys with the store’s own funeral service department, they would have seen just how far their customer loyalty extended.
Unfortunately, it didn’t quite extend to after-burial purchasing. So 2589 saw the very last traditional January sale ending with an undignified auction to dispose of the store’s fittings. Now only the shell of the building remained.
Nothing changed, because nothing was allowed to change. The London historical buildings continuity council made quite sure of that in its rigorous defence of heritage. Anyone was free to purchase the Lancini and start a commercial business up in it, providing it was refurbished to match the original interior plans, and that business was retail shopping.
Another setback to refurbishment was the price the receivers were demanding to satisfy the store’s creditors.
Then news of possession and the beyond reached Earth. And, quite paradoxically, age suddenly became a highly motivating factor in change.
It was old people who sat on the historical buildings continuity council.
London’s most venerated (and richest) banks and financial institutions were mostly governed by centenarians. These were the people who were going to be the first generation of humans who would enter the horror of the beyond know
ing it was waiting for them. Unless, of course, a method of salvation was found. So far the Church (any/every denomination), Govcentral’s science councils, and the Confederation Navy had been unable to provide that salvation.
That just left one possible refuge: zero-tau.
Several companies were quickly formed to supply demand. Obviously, long-term facilities would ultimately be needed to carry these customers of oblivion through the millennia; mausolea more enduring than the pyramids. But they’d take time to design and build; meanwhile the hospital chaplains remained in business. Temporary storage facilities were urgently required.
By a near unanimous vote, the historical buildings continuity council quickly approved a change of use of premises certificate for the Lancini.
Zero-tau pods were shipped in from the Halo and taken in via delivery gates more used to household furnishings and haute couture. The ancient cage lifts had the load capacity to take them up to every floor. Oak floorboards, seasoned by five centuries of dehumidified conditioning, were strong enough to hold the new weight distribution pattern.
Heavy-duty cabling laid in for the floor displays carried sufficient electricity to feed the pods’ power-hungry systems. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the building’s projected three hundred year lifespan, the Lancini would have made a good eternity crypt.
Certainly Paul Jerrold thought it appropriate enough when he was shown to his pod. It was on the fourth floor, one of a long row in the old Horticultural section, lined up opposite the windows. Over half of the big sarcophagi were active, their black surfaces absorbing the dust-choked sunbeams as if they were spatial chasms. The two nurses helped him in over the rim, then fussed round, smoothing down his loose fitting track-suit. He kept quiet through the nannying; at a hundred and twelve he was becoming used to the attitude of medical staff. Always exaggerating the attention they gave their patients, as if the care would go unnoticed if they didn’t.
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