They’d taken to the wheeled vehicles that the estate used on a day-to-day basis, and to those from Veppers’ own collection of automotive exotica, stored and cared for in some of the mansion’s underground garages. There were some fliers left dotted about the place but it looked like they’d fallen victim to the same stray radiation pulses that had knocked out the local comms.
Nolyen had greeted them joyfully as they’d left the flier and somebody had shouted a glad-you’re-safe-sir or something similar from the roof as they’d walked across the courtyard, but that was about it. “Ingrates,” Veppers had muttered as they made their way to the gallery with the most expensive paintings.
“Four minutes and I’ll see you at the Number Three Strongroom!” Veppers called after Jasken, who, arms full of paintings, just turned and nodded. Veppers supposed they could have cut the paintings from the frames, like thieves did, but that had seemed wrong somehow.
Veppers jogged along the gallery, down a radial corridor towards some splendidly tall windows – my, there was a lot of smoke and even some flame out there, and it was far too dark for the time of evening – and let himself into his study. He sat at his desk.
The study was dark in the patchy emergency lighting. He allowed himself the poignant luxury of one last look round the place, thinking how sad, and yet also how oddly exciting it was that it might all soon be gone, then he started opening drawers and compartments. The desk – self-powered, identifying him by his smell as well as by his palm and fingerprints – made soft, sighing, snicking noises as it obeyed him; a little familiar oasis of calm and reassurance in all the chaos. He filled a small hide carrybag with all the most precious and useful things he could think of. The last thing he lifted, after a slight hesitation, was a pair of knives, sheathed in skin-soft hide, that had belonged to his grand-father and, before that, to somebody else’s.
A wind seemed to be getting up, judging from the way smoke was moving on the far side of the barely visible formal gardens; however, despite all the commotion outside, little sound got through the multiply glazed and bullet-proof windows. He was just closing the last drawer, ready to go, when he heard a noise like a faint “pop”.
He looked up and saw a tall, dark alien figure standing looking at him from near the closed doors. For a moment he thought it might be ambassador Huen, but it was somebody else; thin, with a too-straight, contorted-looking back. Dressed in different shades of dark grey.
“Can I help you?” he said, putting the still-open hide bag down at his feet where he sat, and dipping one hand into it, feeling around. He made a waving, distracting gesture with his other hand. “For example, with your manners? We tend to knock first, here.”
“Mr. Joiler Veppers, my name is Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh,” the figure said in an oddly accented voice that might have been female but that definitely didn’t appear to be entirely in synch with its lip-movements. “I am a citizen of the Culture. I am here to apprehend you on suspicion of murder. Will you come with me?”
“How can I put this?” he said, raising and firing the alien-tech gun in the same movement. The gun made a loud snapping noise, light flared in the dim study and the alien disappeared in a silvery shimmer. The doors immediately behind where it had been standing burst open against their hinges, swinging broken and hanging into the corridor beyond in a flurry of black dust, a semi-circular hole punched in each, circumferenced with glowing yellow-white sparks. Veppers looked at the gun – a present from the Jhlupian Xingre, long ago – then at the still-swinging, smoking doors, and finally at the patch of rug where the figure had been standing. “Hmm,” he said.
He shrugged, stood, stuffed the gun into his waistband, snapped the hide bag shut and waved some of the noxious fumes away from his face as he exited through the wrecked doors, which were starting to burn.
“
Jasken.”
He heard the female voice pronounce his name behind him, and knew it was her. He placed the paintings carefully on the floor of the flier and turned. Nolyen had stopped in the doorway of the flier. He was staring over the top of the paintings he held at the young woman standing by the door to the flight deck. Perhaps he was intimidated by the scroll-work of faint, tattooed lines covering her face.
“Miss,” Jasken said, nodding to her.
“It is me, Jasken.”
“I know,” he said. He turned his head deliberately, nodding to Nolyen. “Leave those, Nolyen; never mind anything else. Just leave; get well away from the house.”
Nolyen set the paintings down. He hesitated.
“Get away, Nolyen,” Jasken said.
“Sir,” the young man said, then turned and left.
Lededje watched him go, then turned back to Jasken.
“You let him kill me, Hib.”
Jasken sighed. “No, I tried to stop him. But, in the end, all right; I could have done more. And I suppose I could have killed him after he killed you. So I’m as bad as he is. Hate me if you like. I don’t claim to be a particularly good person, Led. And there is such a thing as duty.”
“I know. I thought you might feel some towards me.”
“My first is towards him, whether either of us likes it or not.”
“Because he pays your wages and all I did was let you fuck me?”
“No; because I pledged myself to his service. I never said anything to you that contradicted that.”
“No, you didn’t, did you?” She gave a wan smile. “I suppose I should have spotted that. How very correct of you, even while you were … despoiling his property. All those little whispered words of tenderness, about how much I meant, what we might hope for in the future. Were you always reviewing them as you said them? Running them past some lawyer bit in your brain, looking for inconsistencies?”
“Something like that,” Jasken told her, meeting her gaze. He shook his head. “We never had a future, Led. Not the sort you wanted to imagine. More quick couplings while his back was turned, hidden from everyone, until one of us got bored, or he found out. You belonged to him for ever, didn’t you ever under-stand that? We were never going to be able to run away together.” He looked down, then back up into her eyes again. “Or are you going to tell me you loved me? Because I always thought you took me as a lover just to get back at him and have me on-side for the next time you tried to escape.”
“Didn’t fucking work, did it?” she said bitterly. “You helped him hunt me down.”
“I had no choice. You didn’t have to run. As—”
“Really? That’s not how it felt to me.”
“As soon as you did, I had to do what my duty to him demanded.”
“So, none of it meant anything.” She was crying a little now, but quickly wiped both cheeks with the back of her wrists, tears smeared across the tattoo lines. “More fool me. Because I didn’t come back just to kill Veppers. I needed to ask how …” She stopped, swallowed. “Did it mean nothing to you?”
Jasken sighed. “Of course it meant something. A sweetness. Moments I’ll never forget. It just couldn’t mean what you wanted it to mean.”
She laughed, without hope or humour. “Then I am a fool, am I not?” she said, shaking her head. “I really did think you might love me.”
He gave the smallest of smiles. “Oh, I loved you with all my heart, from the very first.”
She glared at him.
He stared at her, eyes bright. “It’s just that love is not enough, Led. Not always. Not these days; maybe not ever. And never around people like Joiler Veppers.”
She looked down at the floor of the flier, brought her arms up and hugged herself. Jasken glanced at the time display on the flier’s bulkhead.
“Could be as little as a quarter of an hour till the second wave arrives,” he said. His tone was concerned, even kind. “You seemed to get here pretty fast. Can you get away again just as quickly?”
She nodded. She sniffed back her tears, wiped her cheeks and eyes again. “Do one thing for me,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“Go.”
“Go? I can’t just—”
“Now. Just leave. Take the flier and go. Save the servants and staff; all you can find. But leave him here, with me.”
She looked into his eyes. Jasken hesitated, his jaw working. She shook her head. “He’s finished, Hib,” she said. “The NR – the Nauptre – they know. They can intercept whatever passes between him and the GFCF; they know about his agreement, about how he tricked them. The Culture know everything too. The Hells are gone, so he can’t use those to save himself now. He won’t be allowed to get away with all he’s done. Even if the Enablement can turn a blind eye to something on this scale, he’s got the NR and the Culture to answer to.” She smiled a small, half-despairing smile. “He finally found people more powerful than he is to fall foul of.” She shook her head again. “But the point is: you can’t save him. All you can save now is yourself.” She nodded towards the open door of the flier. “And anybody else you can find out there.”
Jasken looked out through one of the high-level ports in the flier, at the skies above the dully lit mansion. A wall of smoke like the end of the world was lit from beneath by flames.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll try to find him.” Now it was her turn to hesitate. “I will kill him, if I can. Not pretending otherwise.”
“He won’t be an easy man to kill.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “Perhaps I won’t have to. A condition of me getting this chance was that one of the Culture people went to confront him, give him the chance to turn himself in.”
Jasken gave a small, snorting laugh. “Think that’ll work?”
“No.” She tried to smile; failed.
Jasken looked into her eyes for a little while. Then he reached behind his back and brought out a small gun, holding it by the barrel as he passed it to her. “Try the Number Three Strongroom.”
She took the gun. “Thank you.” Their hands hadn’t touched as the weapon passed from him to her. She looked at the gun. “Will it still work?” she asked. “The ship was going to disable all the electronic weapons.”
“Most are already fried,” Jasken told her. “But that one’ll work. “Just metal and chemicals. Ten shots. Safety catch is on the side facing you; move that little lever till you can see the red dot.” He watched her take the safety off. He realised she’d probably never handled a gun in her life. “Take care,” he told her. Another hesitation, as he seemed to think about coming towards her, hugging or holding or kissing her, but then she said:
“You too,” and turned and left, walking out of the flier and across the courtyard.
Jasken looked at the floor for a moment, then along it to the paintings in their ornate frames.
Lededje found the young servant Nolyen in the archway leading to the main vestibule, crouched on his haunches. “You were supposed to leave, Nolyen,”she said.
“I know, miss,” he said. He looked like he’d been crying too.
“Go back to the flier, Nolyen,” she told him. “Mr. Jasken will need help looking for people to take to safety. Now, quickly; still time.”
Nolyen ran back towards the flier and helped Jasken throw the paintings out before they took off to look for people to save.
He jogged down the stairs to the basement. The stairwell was poorly lit and he’d forgotten how far down the level holding the deepest strongrooms was. He’d rung for a lift up in the house, but even as he’d stood watching the floor-indicator display winking on and off with an error code, he’d realised he shouldn’t step into an elevator car in the circumstances even if one did arrive.
He stopped on the last landing, above a pool of darkness beneath, and dug inside the hide bag, pulling out a pair of night-vision glasses; lighter, less bulky but also less sophisticated versions of the Oculenses Jasken had worn. They weren’t working either; he threw them away. Next thing he tried was a torch, but the flash-light refused to work too. He smashed it against the wall. That felt good. At least the bag was getting lighter.
He felt his way down the last few stairs and opened the door to the better-lit corridor beyond. Pipes and conduits covered the ceiling, the floor was concrete and a few large metal doors were the only adornments to the rough-cast walls. A few very dim lights were on constantly; others were flickering. He was a little surprised Jasken wasn’t here already. He supposed time seemed to move oddly when everything was getting this fraught. He checked the antique watch; at least twelve minutes to go.
The strongroom door was a massive circular metal plug as tall as a man and a metre thick. The display – he’d forgotten it even had a display – was blinking an error message.
“Cunt!” he screamed, smashing one fist on the door. He rolled the code in anyway, but the noises the mechanism made didn’t even sound right and the display didn’t alter. Certainly there was no series of reassuring clicks from umpteen places round the door’s circumference, as there would have been if it was unlocking itself. He tried the levers and handles that then had to be moved, but they wouldn’t budge.
He glimpsed movement further down the long curve of the corridor, near a set of doors leading to another stairwell.
“Jasken?” he called. It was hard to tell in the dim, inconstant light. Maybe it was the Culture lunatic who’d come to “appre-hend” him again. He pulled the Jhlupian gun out. No; the figure moving towards him moved normally, looked Sichultian.
“Jasken?” he shouted.
The figure stopped, maybe thirty metres away. It raised its arms level in front of it, gripping something. A gun! he realised as some-thing flashed. He started to fall into a crouch. There was a smack and a whine from somewhere way overhead and to his left, then a barking roar came ringing down the corridor. Crouched on one knee, he aimed the Jhlupian gun at the figure and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He tried again. The figure fired the gun once more and a bullet kicked off the top of the strongroom door, whining away behind him as another thunderclap of noise pulsed down the corridor. He could see smoke swirling round the figure. Smoke? What were they firing? A fucking musket? But at least their gun still worked, unlike the Jhlupian blaster. Like a knife would still work.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” he said, throwing the useless gun away and scrabbling to his feet, holding the hide bag between him and the figure down the corridor as he ran for the doors he’d just come through.
There was something round lying on the floor of the first landing; he discovered this when he trod on it and his foot went out behind him, dropping him and banging his knee on the next step up. He howled in rage, limped on up the steps.
The fucking gun hadn’t worked! It had worked before but it had stopped! Was it some fucking stupid ceremonial piece of junk that only had one fucking shot in it? Xingre, the bastard, had told him it could stop a tank, bring down aircraft and keep on firing till you grew old. Lying mother-fucking alien cunt!
He was one flight down from the ground floor when he heard the doors at the foot of the stairwell bang open and steps come hurrying up towards him. Fuck everything else, then; just get to Jasken, get to the flier. Cut and run. What fucker would dare fire a fucking gun at him anyway? Probably only the demented little bitch claiming to be Y’breq. She was about as good a shot as he’d have expected.
His lungs and throat felt like a blast furnace after running up all those steps; his knee was hurting really badly but he just had to ignore it. He threw open the door to the main ground-level corridor and ran for the nearest courtyard doors.
The flier wasn’t there. He could see this twenty or more steps away from the doorway because there was a large open reception area with huge windows looking straight out at the courtyard, but he kept on running for the doors, not believing what he was seeing, and threw the doors open anyway, in time to see the flier pulling away overhead, as though it had just taken off from the roof of the mansion.
“Jasken!” he screamed, the force of
it tearing at his throat.
He looked frantically round the circular courtyard. This couldn’t be happening. The flier couldn’t have gone. It just couldn’t; he needed it, he needed it to be here, needed it so he could get away. That must have been another, similar flier he’d just seen above the rooftops. It couldn’t have gone. It just wasn’t possible. He was depending on it, so it had to be here. It couldn’t disguise itself, could it? Go see-through or something freakish, could it? It was just a hired civilian flier; nothing military or alien. Best money could hire, built by one of his own companies, but it couldn’t turn fucking invisible. He stared round the courtyard, willing the aircraft still to be there. But all that he could see was a half-collapsed pile of paintings; nothing and nobody else. He glimpsed movement through the windows to one side, in the corridor he’d just run down.
He ran for the nearest archway leading through the house to the grounds. A gun. He needed a gun. An old fashioned chemical-explosion gun. What had happened to Jasken? Jasken had a gun. He always carried several weapons. He had a little hand-gun that had no sight or screen or electrics in it at all, just as a last resort. Dear fuck, it wasn’t Jasken chasing him, was it? He ran through the tall archway leading towards the outside, his steps echoing in the arch high overhead. He glanced back, saw the figure pursuing him, but stumbled and nearly fell as he did so. No, not Jasken. Too small and slim to be Jasken. And Jasken wouldn’t have missed, not twice.
It had to be the little bitch claiming to be Y’breq. She must have tricked Jasken, had an accomplice; maybe the Culture maniac who’d tried to arrest him. They’d be flying the aircraft. The fucking Culture! A gun. Where would he find a gun? He ran out onto the flagstone circle which encompassed the house.
The world was on fire; walls of smoke filled the sky, making a night lit up like hell, flames leaping from a hundred different places, trees and outbuildings all on fire or silhouetted against the fires beyond.
Gun. He needed a gun. There were old-fashioned, ancient, even antique guns splattered liberally over the walls of the house, just like there were swords and spears and shields, but none of them worked; none of them were any fucking use. Who the hell still used old-fashioned guns for fuck’s sake? Gamekeepers? They used lasers like everybody else, didn’t they? He wasn’t even sure where the gamekeepers’ cottages were; hadn’t they been moved when he’d had the raceball court put in?
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