“Let’s spread them out,” Eldlund said, “then march them forward. Those mountains are tough in ordinary conditions, never mind wind like this.”
“Okay.” In his mind, Loi could see them as chess pieces advancing across the board—not that the squares were visible, nor the opponent. Somewhere in the maelstrom ahead, the Olyix transport ships were perched along the top of the Oquirrh range, waiting to pounce as soon as the shield fell. Loi directed the intruder forward, plotting a course to load into its inertial navigation routines. It began to move faster, sliding up onto jagged ridges of exposed rock that marked the start of the foothills. Intermittent streamers of mist streaked down from the slopes above, flowing around it as if it were being sprayed by a water cannon, then vanishing as fast as they came. The local air temperature had risen over twenty degrees Celsius.
“I hope our suits are going to be good enough,” Loi muttered.
“Lim has done a great job. We’re going to be pioneers; they were about the first things human-built initiators ever produced. How cool is that?”
“Scalding, if you must know.”
“You’re such a miserabilist. Concentrate on good news. There must be some.”
“Right. Actually, we might have found a route in to Nikolaj.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Kohei has tracked down some lowlife criminal that they’re hoping to manipulate. If he’s played right, they’ll be able to shut down the Olyix sabotage operation in London without the Salvation’s onemind knowing we can read its thoughts. We need that. London’s shield is close to breaking.”
“As close as Salt Lake City?”
“I think London is worse—just a few hours left now. Mum’s really worried about it. Dad’s still there on the ground, doing his good-guy charity thing.”
“I feel for her.”
Loi concentrated hard on the route up into the mountains.
LONDON
DECEMBER 10, 2206
Over a century ago, the front of the railway arch had been boarded up with a wall of corrugated iron, which left it dark and surprisingly cool inside. The thick brickwork even reduced the constant noise emitted by the stressed shield curving high overhead. Ollie’s flashlight threw a bright beam across the rough floor as he walked in, carrying the hefty watercooler bottle. Twenty paces in, past the protective line of active-shot rat traps, the cocoons of his brother Bik and their grandmother lay on the ground. He and Lolo had moved them into the archway a couple of weeks after Blitz2 began. There was nowhere else. If he’d taken them to one of the official green zone refuges that were being set up, the security agencies and police would have spotted him. So he made it his duty to look after them, keeping them clean and safe.
He shone his flashlight down on the horrible mass of transformed flesh that used to be their torsos. It was difficult now to tell them apart. They were both about the same size, and the myriad features that used to make their faces so individual had slowly sunk away, just like their eyes and ears and mouth, rendering the skulls as blank masks of flesh. Roots like strings of white wax had wormed their way out of each torso, sinking their tendrils into the raw soil in search of basic nutrients.
There was a small table between the two cocoons, with a nearly empty watercooler bottle on it. Ollie shoved it aside and put the new one down in its place, slightly overhanging the edge. Once he was sure it was aligned properly, he turned on the tap at the bottom. Water dripped slowly onto the ground, where the roots had grown into a small crater shape. He’d checked on solnet how to care for a cocoon, like so many who couldn’t part from a loved family member, and learned it was important to give them a regular supply of water.
He smiled weakly at his brother’s eroded face. “I’m close, Bik,” he promised. “Really close now, yeah? I’m going to find out where Nikolaj is hiding, and when I do you’ll be sorted. Trust me, whatever it takes. I’ll make that bitch grow you back to what you was, see? Then you can go do parkour again, as much as you want.”
Every time, he hoped to see something, some tiny twitch of flesh, just a sign that Bik had heard him. People in comas know what’s going on around them, right? But now, as always, what was left of Bik remained motionless.
“See you soon, bro.”
Lolo was waiting back in the curtained-off section of the industrial shed, switching on the lanterns. Sie gave him a contented smile. “Are they okay?”
“Sure, yeah.” He jerked his thumb back toward the kilns. “Did you smell anything back there?”
“No. Why?”
“Thought I could smell smoke. One of the doors must be out of alignment.”
“More likely the ducts.”
“I’ll check it over tomorrow.”
“I can do that. I’m not freeloading here, you know.”
“Thanks.” He watched appreciatively as Lolo stood on the bed and stretched up to close the skylight blind above it. Sie was wearing a t-shirt that rode up to show off plenty of toned abdomen. “Nice.”
Lolo gave him a cheeky grin and stepped down. “Thank you.”
A kiss, with their arms around each other. Easy and undemanding, a promise of intimacy later. Knowing he was going to be having sex lifted Ollie’s mood out of the melancholia elicited by visiting the cocoons.
“I have to knead my dough first,” Lolo said, and walked over to the marble-topped table sie used for cooking.
“Is that what you call it?”
“You can be so basic. I’m experimenting with flake pastry. It’s difficult to do properly by hand.”
The disapproving tone didn’t fool Ollie for an instant. He started taking off his clothes, and yes, put them in the laundry basket like they were fucking married or something. At least the kilns meant they had enough electricity to power the washing machine; hand cleaning stuff would’ve been just unbearable.
With the sound of Lolo pounding and rolling the dough, Ollie settled back on the bed and accessed the files that had been streamed from the surveillance gear he’d planted around the Icona that morning. He told Tye to pull an image of every person who went in or out of the building. There weren’t many. It didn’t surprise him. Despite everything, London these days had a decent vibe about it, a sense of pulling together that even a cynic like him couldn’t escape. Neighborhoods had cohesion. People looked out for one another. Everyone was level. But not Docklands. It was probably the lurking presence of the green zone, with its multitude of cocoons, that made it subtly disaffecting. If you lived there, it was because you had no choice.
In the fourteen hours since his visit, eight people had gone through the Icona’s doors. Ollie started reviewing them. National files still existed; it was just getting to them that was the problem. The lownet had gone, blown away by security agency G8Turings in a vicious darkware war as the Olyix sabotage began. What was left of solnet was a much simplified version, which made monitoring straightforward for the authorities. So he had to set up convoluted routes using every trick Gareth had ever taught him.
He was disappointed that Larson himself hadn’t used the Icona’s doors, but then Brandon Schumder had said the man never left his apartment. However, Tye did identify Cestus Odgers, who had gone in at twelve-thirty carrying a hessian tote bag and then out again at one twenty-five, sans bag. The files Tye extracted from London’s business register showed Odgers was a memorabilia trader, with several commercial ventures down the years. He even co-owned a trade convention that had put on a couple of shows back in 2195.
“Got one,” Ollie cried.
Lolo looked around. “One what?”
“A way in to Larson. Bloke called Cestus Odgers. He deals in all that crap Larson likes. He’s still dealing by the look of it, and I’ve got an address on him.”
“Oh.”
“Come on, we’ve spent two years pursuing Nikolaj. This is the best shot yet.”
“I know.” Lolo put the dough down with a sigh and came over to the bed. Sie slipped through a gap in the white veils and lay beside him. “It’s just…Nikolaj is different. If you’re right, she’s working for the Olyix.”
“If I’m right?”
“Ollie.” Sie cuddled up and kissed him urgently. “I need you to be careful. Promise me.”
“Hey, I’m not going to blow this now. I’ve got too much riding on it. Bik and Gran are depending on me.”
“Yes.”
“Wow, the enthusiasm.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just…” Sie stroked Ollie’s cheek, then slid a finger down to the slim black insurance collar. “Why do you need this?”
“You know why, because you just said it. Nikolaj works for the Olyix, so there’s no telling what she’s got protecting her. I need to get physically close.”
“I’m frightened. For you. It’s not just Bik and your grandmother that need you. I do, too—especially now. There’s got to be someone else who can do this. Can’t you just…grass them?”
Ollie chuckled at how foreign Lolo sounded right then. “If I thought it would do any good, I would send every file I have to Special Branch. But you’ve met them, remember? Was that a happy time?”
“No.”
“So, that’s settled then.”
LONDON
DECEMBER 11, 2206
Cestus Odgers was easier than expected. Ollie turned up at his house, playing the desperate innocent routine, saying how eager he was to sell the Nightstar model for a cryptoken full of watts. Odgers wouldn’t buy it for himself. “It’s a small piss-poor market these days, fella. And I don’t have that kind of money anymore. But I know someone that does.”
The finder’s fee was a half-charged quantum battery. Ollie didn’t try to haggle. An easy mark. So the call was made to Larson, who agreed to meet. But Ollie had to have the model for inspection, to prove he wasn’t a time waster.
So once again he found himself cycling into Docklands, this time with the Nightstar rattling along in the trailer behind him. He’d never had weapons peripherals, like some in the Legion. Instead he put on the jacket with the systems from his stealth suit, ran diagnostics on the darkware Tye was loaded with, and finally stashed the nerve-block pistol and synth slugs into the Nightstar’s hangar deck. A twenty-centimeter ceramic blade was strapped to his forearm, under the jacket.
The Icona entrance had an old-style intercom, with an actual physical button for every apartment. When Ollie pressed for the third-floor penthouse, Tye used the passive sensors stitched into his jacket to see if he was being scanned. But the only electrical activity it could detect was a small current in the intercom panel, powering a camera.
Larson’s voice came out of the intercom. “Come on up, and bring the model.” The door lock buzzed.
Ollie hadn’t anticipated having to carry the model, and definitely not up three flights of stairs. It wasn’t excessively heavy, but getting it up the twisting stairwell without knocking it against the wall was a bastard of a trip.
He was sweating heavily by the time he reached the third floor and came out onto a long corridor with a half-dozen doors. There were no windows, but one of the doors was open, providing some light. As he passed it, he saw the apartment had been ransacked. Tye detected an active local network using sensors lining the corridor to scan him, so it infiltrated the node and launched a series of darkware packages into the system.
The door at the end of the corridor didn’t have a handle; instead there was a single red LED glowing in the center. Ollie stood in front of it, looking twitchy, as any chancer would.
There was a soft click, and the door swung inward a couple of centimeters.
“Come in,” a voice said from inside. “The power hinges don’t work, so you’ll have to push.”
The door was as heavy as a bank vault’s. Hard to get moving, but once he’d applied enough pressure it swung back as smoothly as if it were floating on oil. Ollie staggered in with the Nightstar clutched in front of him. Tye splashed the progress of the darkware as it slipped undetected through the penthouse systems. Larson clearly took his security a lot more seriously than Schumder did. There were five concealed guns in the walls and ceiling, as well as a panic room. Tye disabled the weapons.
Ollie peered around the purple-and-black mosaic that was the Nightstar’s curving wings. The penthouse was open plan, presenting a single split-level reception room with a high ceiling, and a window wall looking out across the Royal Dock outside. Once upon a time it must have been a swish place to live, but now…Tall glass display cabinets cluttered the floor, the only furniture left—esoteric tombstones turning the big space into a mausoleum of extinct trash-culture. Every centimeter of their shelf space was full of figurines and toys and show-branded games and badges, but that still wasn’t enough space for the collection. Ollie managed to walk six paces into the room and then couldn’t go any farther. Plastic crates were piled up in the aisles, overflowing with more junk. Models of vehicles combined with furry alien creatures to form long, unruly dunes, onto which tides of actual paper books had fallen, their bizarre, colorful covers slowly fading as entropy brittled them. Signed posters of ancient blockbuster movies in fanciful gothic frames covered two walls, while the final wall was made up of screens stacked like oversize glass bricks. Most of them were dead, leaving the few live rectangles playing drama shows that had peaked over a century ago. To Ollie, they were windows into odd alternative pasts that—given Blitz2—actually now seemed quite enticing. The central screen was playing a Nightstar episode.
He looked down at his feet in puzzlement. There really was no way farther into the room without wading through and over this hoard of valueless treasure. “Hello?”
“Welcome, welcome,” said a voice overhead.
Ollie assumed it was a speaker, but glanced up anyway just as a peculiar motion caught his eye. The room’s ceiling had exposed metal beams, painted as black as the concrete they supported. They now served as rails for an industrial hoist mechanism. Ollie’s jaw dropped. Karno Larson was hanging from the hoist on metal cables. He was obscenely large, his torso a flaccid globe covered in a shiny green toga that was more like a wrap of bandages, ensuring no skin was visible. Limbs were equally gross—thick appendages that were so bloated they seemed incapable of movement. His corpulent head rose out of the toga without any sign of a neck, rolls of skin glistening under a film of perspiration. Straggly gray hair was tied back in a ponytail, woven with strips of orange leather.
The harness that held him also sported various modules that Tye was telling Ollie were medical support machines. Tubes snaked out of them, disappearing into the toga between the bands of cloth, swaying about as fluids pumped through.
Staring up as Larson slid toward him like a dirigible Peter Pan, Ollie could easily believe the man was the victim of a cocooning gone horribly wrong. The hoist came to a halt, and motors made a loud whirring sound, lowering Larson down toward the jumble of ancient merchandise. Globular feet touched a batch of coffee-table books featuring science fiction artwork, and they started to bend beneath him.
“What an excellent—” Larson paused and his head bowed forward, allowing him to suck air from a tube, “—specimen.”
“Are you all right?” Ollie blurted, which was probably dumber than anything even Lars had ever said.
“Absolutely fine, my dear fellow. You don’t get to live this long without making a few compromises.”
Yes, you fucking do. “Right.”
“In these sorry times, I feel quite privileged. I am the last person alive who appreciates the culture of ephemeral modernity.” Motors whirred again, and slim wires Ollie hadn’t noticed before lifted Larson’s arms into a benediction posture, as if he were the puppet of an unseen deity. “So every relic I desire now flows to me, as your presence proves. I am become the ultimate steward of this glorious
genre of human creativity. As such, I have determined that when we fall to the Olyix, I will welcome them here into my temple of unparalleled artistic wealth. And together, we will carry this unique trove to the end of time. Their God will rejoice in what I bring.”
“Uh—” Ollie let out a long breath of dismay, as he realized that Larson was utterly crazy. But the information about Nikolaj’s location was in that deranged head of his. “Isolate the penthouse,” he told Tye.
“Done.”
“Please hold the Nightstar up,” Larson said. “It looks truly magnificent. You say it is handmade?”
A smiling Ollie proffered the Nightstar as if it were a religious artifact. “Tye, disengage the hoist.”
Larson’s shiny forehead crinkled into a frown. “Something is wrong.” He sucked on the air tube again, then let out a wild mewling sound as the cables that held him started to unwind off the winch drums. He toppled backward in a curious slow motion, as if gravity hadn’t quite established a decent grip on him. The toys and books he landed on bent and crumpled in a grinding dissonance.
Ollie pushed his hand into the Nightstar’s hangar deck and tugged out his nerve-block pistol. It occurred to him that using it on Larson might not be the smartest idea. Who knew what would happen to a body like that if the nervous system suffered a failure? Tye was busy splashing up the medical data from the man’s modules. Ollie wasn’t much good at reading the details, but the number of amber icons was unnerving. He fished the synth slugs from the Nightstar and clambered over the ridiculous memorabilia to stand where Larson could see him.
“Take—take—” Larson gasped. He sucked frantically at his air tube.
“Take what? No, listen, I don’t care about this junk. I’m here to find out where Nikolaj is. That’s it, that’s all I need, understand? So, where is the Paynor family house where she’s holed up? Tell me that and I’ll let you up again.”
Larson’s frightened eyes stared up at him.
The Saints of Salvation Page 9