I tried to shake my head but the pain was just too great. “Not the station,” I said. “Home. My house.”
That was a mistake, because the surprise almost made Wally lose control of the car. “What?” he said when he was back on the right side of the road. “Why?”
“Take me to the house,” I said as calmly as I could. “It’s important. Life or death.” I had no idea if this was true or not. It certainly felt as if it was.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No way.”
“Wally, seriously, that’s an order.”
“No,” he said again. “I’m taking you to hospital.”
I sighed and almost blacked out from the pain in my chest. Punctured lung? I would probably be dead by the time Wally got me to the nearest Accident & Emergency department. I said, “Okay, Wally, you win. Stop off at the house for five minutes and then take me to hospital.” I looked out through the windscreen, recognised where we were. “It’s on the way.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something there that will help you catch the person who did this to me.” He seemed unconvinced, and I couldn’t blame him, because it was a flat-out lie. I added, “I’m going to be out of action for a while so you’ll have to make the arrest, but you’ll need this thing from the house.”
“What thing?”
“It’s easier if I just show you.”
He thought about it for so long that I thought he was going to miss the turning that led towards the house, but finally he said, “Five minutes.”
“Good. Thank you.” I relaxed a fraction and almost passed out again. Something occurred to me. “Did you phone this in?”
“You told me not to.”
I couldn’t remember anything between Cary Grant rushing me, and waking up in the passenger seat of Wally’s car. I said, “Where did you find me?”
“By your car.”
Nothing. No memory at all. Had I managed to fight the avatar off? Had it been interrupted by someone else? Had it left me for dead? Had it just got bored of hitting me? I tried to open my eyes but my face was swelling up so much that I could barely see as Wally turned the car onto the lane leading up to my house. The lane was narrow and the surface was peppered with potholes; Wally tried to be careful but every time we ran over one it felt as if my body was coming apart. And the lane was a brand new motorway compared to the track which turned off it to my property. Mister Keoshgerian’s lorries had left deep ruts in the track and the car bounced along them. Wally slowed us to an agonising crawl and I gritted my teeth and tried to hold myself together for a few more minutes.
Wally finally stopped the car in front of the house. He turned off the engine and looked over at me and the look he gave me made me think that I had underestimated Wally Mole. He was much brighter than anyone imagined. I didn’t know if that made him dangerous or not.
“Help me out,” I said.
“Can’t you just tell me where this thing is and I’ll go and get it?” he said.
“You’ll never find it,” I told him. “Help me out.”
He got out, came around the front of the car, and opened the passenger door. He undid my seatbelt and half-lifted me out. I managed to stand, more or less, on my good leg by leaning on the roof of the car, but my heart was pounding and everything kept greying out. I hurt so much I could barely move, let alone walk. I draped an arm across Wally’s shoulders and hobbled agonisingly from the car to the front door.
The house was basically an empty shell, just walls and floors and roof. The windows hadn’t been installed yet and the front door was just a rectangular hole covered with a sheet of plywood to keep animals out. Wally managed to push it out of the way without dropping me, and we went inside, Wally playing the beam of his torch over the rough unfinished floors and walls
“Living room,” I whispered. “First door on the left.”
My toes scraped on the bare concrete floor as Wally dragged me through into what I had once hoped would be my living room. He stopped and looked around the bare room. “Now what?” he said.
“Put me on the floor,” I said, feeling myself start to drift away again.
“I’m sorry?”
“Sit me down for a minute, Wally. Please.”
He lowered me to the floor and I sat there with a ringing in my ears and my vision fading in and out. It occurred to me that I probably really was dying. Broken ribs, broken leg, possible punctured lung, probable concussion at the very least. There was not a single part of me which was not in agony.
I put the palm of my good hand down on the concrete floor and said as clearly as I could, “Augustus Francesco de Palma y Granchester.” There was a faint blur of motion across the floor and a square of concrete about two metres on a side turned red, became tenuous and misty, and swept away, exposing a square black hole in the floor. I heard Wally swear and take a step back.
“What’s going on?” he asked quietly.
“Magic,” I told him. “Help me up.” He managed to get me to my feet again. “We have to go down there,” I told him, nodding at the hole. “There are sixteen steps and a wall at the bottom.”
Wally, being Wally, chose this moment to get stubborn. “Not until you tell me what this is all about, Frank.”
I sat there, completely spent, just metres from salvation, and shook my head. “Okay, Walter. Fuck off back to work. I can crawl down there on my own.”
“Can you?”
I considered it. “No. I can’t. Congratulations, Wally, you’ve got me by the balls. What you have to ask yourself is, what are you going to do now?”
“What you have to ask yourself,” he said, “is what are you going to do now.”
I tried to smile, but my face no longer responded to orders. “I have always underestimated you, Walter,” I told him. “I apologise.”
This confused him. “What?”
“Look at it this way,” I said. “If you leave me here and go away, you’ll never find out what I’m hiding in my cellar.”
Wally gave this some thought, while a storm of darkness boiled at the edge of my vision. Finally, I felt him lift me again and start to move towards the trapdoor.
Getting me down the steps was awkward. I bumped my head a couple of times, but it didn’t make me feel substantially worse. The lights came on as we reached the second step, and I felt Wally start in surprise, but he kept going, carrying his Sergeant towards who knew what.
At the bottom of the steps was a smooth grey wall. I reached out and put my hand flat against it and waited while the security system tasted my DNA. It seemed to take a long long time.
There was a faint whining sound, like a swarm of bees, just on the edge of audibility, and the wall turned to smoke and blew away.
“Fuck!” Wally shouted.
“Open sesame,” I muttered.
In the light of the stairwell I could see a space about ten feet high by twenty long, empty save for a large shadowy shape. “Lights,” I said, and the lights in the cellar came on. I mumbled, “Power-up,” and heard the faint answering whine of equipment coming alive. It sounded more alive than I did.
The Machine sat in the middle of the floor, gunmetal grey, the size of an armchair, and shaped like a blood platelet. I waved at it. “Over there. Sit me down there.”
Wally was suffering from culture shock; he didn’t say a word, just dragged me over to the Machine and put me down. He thought it was some weird piece of furniture. He was in for a surprise.
I put my hand against the cool hard surface beneath me. “Medical emergency,” I muttered, and the surface puckered under my palm. I heard a scraping noise on the floor, peered myopically across the cellar, and saw Wally backing towards the steps. I said, “Make secure,” and the wall came back, sealing us off from the outside world. Up in the living room, the trapdoor was being reconfigured. “Relax,” I told Wally. “This won’t take long.” And I curled up as best I could on top of the Machine and felt myself sinking into it, and then I went away.
You could also, if you knew where to look, learn how to compile hunting knives, pistols, assault weapons, nerve gas, microton nuclear munitions and hot viruses. Got a neighbour who turns his sound system up to the pain threshold at four o’clock in the morning when you’ve got an important meeting at nine? You can turn his house into a smoking hole in the ground that’ll set off Geiger counters for the next thousand years. You can call down a plague of boils on his children. You can make his nuts swell up like basketballs. Urban angst? Nanotechnology will help you settle the score.
So it was strictly licenced and regulated, and if that meant the abolition of Tyranny was postponed a little and Paradise was still tantalisingly just out of reach, well that was the price you paid in order to sleep a little more soundly at night.
Except.
It’s axiomatic that people can be angry and irrational sometimes, but it’s also axiomatic that the same is true for nations. The problem is that when people get angry and irrational the body count is relatively low. When nations do it, they start making weapons of mass destruction to use on their neighbours, or their ideological enemies, or anyone that looks sideways at them.
On the other hand, on a strictly personal level, nanotechnology was the greatest hangover cure ever invented, so swings and roundabouts.
I opened my eyes. I was lying curled up on the floor stark naked next to the Machine, and I felt great. No pain, nothing broken. I took a deep, steady breath and sat up.
“Who are you?”
I pulled a face. I’d forgotten all about Wally. I turned my head and looked at him and said, “I’m Frank Grant.”
He waved at the Machine. “You were inside that thing.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Yes, I was. Would you believe it’s a new supersecret hangover cure?” I watched his face. “No.” I sighed. “Worth a try.” I patted the Machine. “This, Constable Mole, is nanotechnology.” Although calling it that was like calling a Bugatti Veyron a ‘car’.
Wally looked at the Machine. Then he looked at me. “Let me out of here, Frank.”
“Can’t do that yet, Wally,” I said, getting to my feet. “We need to talk.” He took a couple of steps back and I stopped and held out my hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“What’s going on, Frank?”
“I need to ask you to keep this quiet,” I told him. “If anyone finds out about it my career’s over.”
There was a fairly robust culture of macho at the station. Some of the other officers made fun of Wally because he seemed a little slow, but he wasn’t really. He was a bright, decent copper and he took care to think about stuff before he did it, where others just stormed in and relied on testosterone to get the job done. He was also a good friend; I couldn’t think of a single officer at the station who would have helped me like this.
He said, “Jesus, Frank. What the fuck are you doing with that thing in your cellar?” He glanced past me at the Machine, and I took a single step forward and tapped him on the forehead with the tip of my index finger. He crumpled so quickly that I barely managed to get my hands under his armpits in time to lower him to the floor. I ordered up some clothes and got dressed, then I dragged Wally across to the Machine, gave it a few commands, pushed his hand into it, and left them to get to know each other.
Back upstairs, I went out and drove Wally’s car around to the back of the house and spent an hour or so wiping my blood off the interior. There was a lot of it and in the torchlight I couldn’t be sure I’d got it all, but it was the best I could do.
Back in the cellar, the Machine had finished its run and spat Wally out. He was crumpled on the floor beside it, still out cold. I ran a diagnostic, and by the time it was complete he was beginning to stir. I got him to his feet and walked him half-conscious up the stairs and out to the car.
I drove us back into the village, parked outside the police station, and gave Wally a poke. “Walter. Come on, wake up. I’m home.”
Wally opened his eyes and looked out of the windscreen. “What?” he said.
“You should go home and get some sleep,” I told him. “Or do you want me to drive you?”
He struggled upright against his seatbelt. “What? No.” He blinked. “What.”
“Don’t bother writing up your report right now,” I said. “Tomorrow morning will do; just make sure your notes are in order.”
“What notes?”
“About Dronfield Farm.”
He rubbed his face hard with both hands, trying to wake up. “Right,” he said. “Will do.”
“Everything was secure,” I told him. “No sign of intruders. Bit of a waste of time, really, but I couldn’t sleep so I volunteered to go with you.”
“Right,” he said again. “Thanks for that, Frank.” Messing around with his short-term memory like this was a fairly piss-poor way of repaying him for what had been a considerable act of kindness, but I didn’t have time for anything more subtle; I still had to go out and retrieve my car.
I made sure he was properly awake, then I got out and watched him drive away. According to his dashboard clock it was almost five in the morning. People around here tended to wake early, getting ready for the commute to Huddersfield and Sheffield, and soon there would be people on the road.
There was no time to be subtle about it. I went into the yard at the back of the station, opened one of the sheds, and took out a bicycle, cycled up to the forestry plantation, drove back into the village with the bike in the back of the car, parked around the corner from the station, and returned the bike. I was back in my flat just as the station started to wake up for the morning shift, but I didn’t feel remotely tired. I made myself a coffee, opened my laptop, and started to make plans.
Six
One evening couple of days later, I was loading the dishwasher when someone knocked on the door. I opened it and found Pep Song Hing standing in the corridor.
We stood looking at each other for quite some time, Pep and I. I hadn’t seen her for a very long while, but she didn’t seem to have changed very much, apart from letting her hair grow long enough to wear it in a ponytail. She’d kept her own face, as had I, which at least made recognising each other fairly painless. Finally, I moved aside and let her step into the flat. I closed and locked the door.
She stood in the middle of the living room, looking around and beaming as if delighted by what she was seeing. Then she turned and did the same thing to me. “Francesco,” she said.
“Pep,” I said from the door.
“You seem to have done well for yourself,” she said, and I couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or not.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
“You let me in,” she said, putting her denim rucksack down on the floor by her feet and taking off her long black overcoat.
“No,” I said patiently. “I meant in here.”
“Ah,” she waved it away. “Your colleagues seem friendly. Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” When I didn’t move from where I was she grinned at me. “Back on the wagon, Francesco?” she said. “Well done. Good thing I brought my own, then.” And she bent down and rummaged in the rucksack for a moment and came up with a bottle of what I could see, even from here, was a very good and very expensive single malt.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Well, for the moment a glass would do,” she told me. I nodded at the cupboards a
nd she looked at the kitchen in delight and said, “Oh, a kitchenette!” I walked over, took a glass from a cupboard, and handed it to her. “So,” she said, looking around the flat again. “This is nice.”
I stood looking at her. I hadn’t expected Regis to send someone, and even if I had it wouldn’t have occurred to me that it would be Pep.
She looked at me and screwed up her eyes. “You could at least say something like ‘nice to see you, Pep.’ After all this time.”
Throwing her out was not an option. Quite apart from the fuss it would cause, notwithstanding whatever ruse or gizmo she had used to get in here in the first place, Pep was – had been, anyway – a soldier. Some extremely refined species of Special Forces. She was a foot shorter than me and looked as if a stern look would knock her unconscious, but she could break every bone in my body without getting out of breath. And that was before you took into account any enhancements she might have dialled in. I went over to one of the armchairs and sat down.
“Well, it’s nice to see you, anyway, Francesco,” she said, perching on the sofa and putting the bottle of Scotch down on the cofeetable between us. “How long has it been?”
“You know exactly how long it’s been.” Not long enough.
“And how are you enjoying police work?”
I sighed.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m keeping up my end of the conversation. It’s not like you’re going to ask me what I’ve been up to, is it.”
“I think I can guess.”
She looked around the flat again, then at me. “Regis showed me your letter,” she said. “It sounds as if you have a situation here.”
“Have you come to sort it out?”
She shook her head. “I’m just here to deepen the contact, hear you out. Make sure you haven’t gone a little gaga out here in the sticks.”
“And then what?”
She shrugged. “I imagine we’ll wing it. We always do, don’t we?”
I said, “There’s someone else here. Someone not us. I was almost beaten to death by an avatar the other night.”
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