“I was already investigating that before he even got involved,” I said.
“No you weren’t,” she told me. “He was working on it long before you came along. If it had just been you the Hallams would have managed to keep a lid on it, but Regis decided it would be an ideal situation to attract the attention of the Security Services.”
“He sent the avatar.”
“Not the first one. He sent the second one, the one that beat you up. I don’t imagine he was terribly worried whether it killed you or not, so long as it provoked a response from Sachs’s superiors.”
“Did he kill Oxley too?”
She smiled again, but this time it was a sad smile, one touched with regret. “No,” she said. “No, good guess but that was something else, completely unconnected. But it was another thing Regis thought he could use, and it’s another black mark against his name.” I wondered just how angry the Elders were with Regis, what they would do to him. “He thinks he’s clever,” she went on. “But he’s really not.”
“I’m just a passenger,” I said. “I have no idea what’s going on. Regis says someone rewrote the original message and piggybacked themselves here with us.”
Christine made a rude noise. “Have you any idea how hard that would be?”
“I do, actually.”
She looked at me again, and this time she grinned, just for a moment. She rummaged in her bag for a moment, came up holding a car key on an electronic fob. She held them out to me. “There’s a van parked on a meter on Regent’s Park Road, near the canal bridge,” she said. “Do yourself a favour, Francesco. Get out of here. It’ll only bring you grief if you stay.” When I just sat looking at the key, she said, “You won’t get another chance, I promise you.”
I glanced at Andrew, but he was still lost in contemplation of the view. “Why are you giving me these?”
“You’re an innocent bystander, Francesco,” she said. “Make yourself scarce, start again, keep your head down. We’ll deal with this now.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was a little boy who had just been dismissed by his headteacher. I said, “I don’t appreciate being patted on the head and told to fuck off.”
“That’s too bad,” she said with a grim little smile. “Because it’s all you’re going to get.” She waggled the key in front of my face. “Last chance, Francesco.”
I thought about it a moment longer, then I reached out and took the key. “Anything else?”
“We might check in with you, from time to time,” she said. “But don’t count on it. Now go. I’ll stick around for a while and make sure your friend doesn’t wake up prematurely.”
I stood up and looked at her. There was no point memorising her face because by this time tomorrow she would probably look completely different. I said, “What are the Hallams to you?”
“Unfinished business,” she said. She shooed me away. “Go.”
I walked down the hill without looking back. On Regent’s Park Road, near the canal, I held up the keyfob and started clicking the button, and a moment later I was rewarded with a blink of indicators a little further along the line of parked cars.
The lights belonged to a grubby white Berlingo van, the sort of thing you saw on the roads all the time and never noticed. In the back, covered with a sheet, was a Machine. When I put my hand on its surface, I felt it start to wake up.
I stood at the open back doors of the van, thinking. The Elders had broken into my cellar, stolen my Machine, brought it to London, and waited for an opportunity to present it to me. In itself, that wasn’t a particularly complicated operation, if you assumed they knew how to get into the cellar in the first place, but it was a quiet demonstration of what they were capable of. We can do this kind of thing with our eyes shut. Imagine what we can do when we really put our minds to it.
I closed the doors, went round and sat in the driver’s seat. In the glove compartment, tucked in among dusters and tubes of mints and old parking permits, was a battered wallet. In the wallet were five hundred pounds in twenty pound notes, a couple of credit cards in the name of Duncan Wallace, and a driving licence in the same name. Duncan Wallace lived in Hackney and, judging by the photograph on the licence, he was me, the poor bastard.
There was still time to change my mind, but that option had evaporated as soon as Christine dangled the key to the van in front of me. My life hadn’t really belonged to me since sometime before I was despatched to Dronfield Farm, and it was time to change that.
I started the engine, put the van into gear, and drove off.
I got the Machine to compile a simple phone and I called Sachs’s number.
“That was a cheap trick, Frank,” she said.
It hadn’t been my trick, but there was no need for her to know that. “I would apologise, but I’m all out of sympathy,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“Not going to tell you that, sorry.”
“Come back in,” she said. “It’s not too late. We can talk about this.”
“It’s way too late,” I told her. “It was already too late when we first met.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line, then Sachs said, “What do you mean?”
“This whole thing is a scam,” I said. “It’s a con to get Regis into your hands and make you think you’re in control of the situation, but you’re not at all. What has he told you he wants?”
Another silence. “If you come back, I’ll tell you.”
“I’m guessing he’s been trailing clues in front of you for months, little bits and pieces to get your attention, and when he thought you were good and ready he fed you me and Dronfield Farm. Who told you I was going to meet him in London?”
She took a moment to answer that. “We had a tip-off.”
“Yeah, right. We’ve been played, Sachs. He wanted you to round us up. He wanted to be in a position to get something from you.”
There was another silence, this time a long one. I imagined Sachs emailing or texting on another phone or just writing a note and giving it to someone.
“We can meet somewhere,” she said finally, and I heard an edge of anger in her voice. “Venue of your choice, anywhere you like. I’ll come alone.”
“Oh, please, Sachs. Don’t insult my intelligence, it’s already been insulted enough. All that stuff about people piggybacking back here on our signal? It’s bollocks. The best thing you can do right now is lock Regis and the other two up and throw away the key.”
More silence.
I sighed. “They’ve done a runner, haven’t they.”
“What’s that noise in the background? Is that engines? Are you on a boat?”
“They’ve all gone and they’ve taken whatever it was Regis talked you into giving him and by now they’ve changed their appearance and you’ll never see them again, Sachs. I’m all you’ve got left.”
“We know you’re here now, Frank. We’ll find you.”
“With respect, you couldn’t find your arse with your hands and a pack of hunting dogs.” And neither could I, apparently. We’d both been played; Regis needed someone clueless like me to make the whole thing look plausible, and he stampeded me in the right directions and I’d fallen for it.
More silence. This time, I could almost hear the fury at the other end of the line. She said, “Can you find them?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Eventually.”
“I’m authorised to make a deal,” she said without hesitation.
“That sounds like quite a boast,” I said. “What I think is, you’ll make a deal and then clear it with your superiors afterward. I imagine you’re in quite a lot of trouble right now, what with losing us and whatever Regis got away with.”
“You’re such a dick, Frank. You’re all dicks. Five hundred years of scientific advance and what did you do with it? Destroy the fucking human race.”
Jesus, he’d actually gone ahead and told her about the Extinction. I wouldn’t have put it past him to spin a tale ab
out a Golden Age with thriving colonies on far-flung exoplanets, but he’d played it straight, and I thought that was significant. He’d been trying to scare her into doing something for him.
I said, “That may not happen now. We’ve introduced too many changes to the timeline.” The difference between me and Sachs was that I might, conceivably, still be around in five hundred years’ time to see if this was true or not.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It did happen. You did fuck up. And you ran away.”
“The Extinction wasn’t my fault, Sachs. And you’d have taken the chance too, in my place.”
I heard her take a deep breath, getting control of her anger. “Jesus.” I thought if we stayed on the phone much longer I would hear Sachs banging her forehead against the nearest flat surface. “What is wrong with you people?”
“What did Regis want?”
This time, she thought about it for a long while before answering. “He wanted a file,” she said. “And if you want to know any more than that you’ll have to hear it from me in person.”
It must be a hell of a file, for Regis to come up with such a convoluted and risky scheme to get sight of it. I said, “I told you not to trust him.”
“Very good, Frank,” she said. “You win. Congratulations.”
“It’s not about winning, Sachs. I haven’t won anything. I have no job and no home and I’m on the run; how is that winning?”
“You’re still way ahead of me.”
“If I am, it’s unusual. Goodbye, Sachs.” I hung up and sat looking about the deck of the ferry. I thought about Christine’s line about ‘tidying up’ and wondered how far the Elders would go to cover their tracks. Would Sachs and her colleagues even remember any of this in a couple of weeks’ time? With patience and care and the right resources, it should be possible to edit this whole thing out of personal and institutional memory. I wondered if that had been Regis’s intention all along, to get his hands on the file and then manoeuvre the Elders into covering his tracks for him, in which case all I’d done was help. I supposed it was possible that the ‘tidying up’ would include me, that one day I’d wake up with a new name and a new face and a new life and no memory at all of what I’d been doing for the past few months, but I suspected the Elders would want to deal with Regis, and it would be handy to leave me alone to try and track him down. We were going to have a difference of opinion about what to do when I finally did catch up with him, but we could cross that bridge when we came to it.
I got up and went over to the railing and unobtrusively dropped the phone into Belfast Lough. Then I turned and headed for the car deck. We’d be docking soon.
About the Author
Dave Hutchinson is a science fiction writer who was born in Sheffield in 1960 and read American Studies at the University of Nottingham. He subsequently moved into journalism, writing for The Weekly News and the Dundee Courier for almost 25 years. He is best known for his Fractured Europe series (Solaris), which has received multiple award nominations, with the third novel, Europe in Winter, winning the BSFA Award for Best Novel. His novella The Push (NewCon Press), a tale involving the birth of faster-than-light travel and speculating on the consequences of settling other worlds, was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. Hutchinson has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. His short story “The Incredible Exploding Man”, which featured in the first Solaris Rising anthology, was selected for Gardner Dozois’ 29th Year’s Best anthology.
NewCon Press Novellas Set 5: The Alien Among Us
Nomads – Dave Hutchinson
Are there really refugees from another time living among us? And, if so, what dreadful event are they fleeing from? When a high speed car chase leads Police Sergeant Frank Grant to Dronfield Farm, he finds himself the focus of unwanted attention from Internal Affairs and is confronted by questions he’s not sure he ever wants to hear answered.
Morpho – Philip Palmer
When the corpse on the mortuary slab sits up and speaks to Hayley, asking for her help, she thinks she’s losing her mind. If only it were that simple… Philip Palmer delivers a tense fast-paced tale of a secret society that governs our world from the shadows, of immortality at a terrible price and events that lead to the overthrow of social order.
The Man Who Would Be Kling – Adam Roberts
When two people ask the manager at Kabul Station to take them into the Afghanizone he refuses. What sane person wouldn’t? Said to represent alien visitation, the zone is deadly. Nothing works there. Electrical items malfunction or simply blow up. The pair go in anyway, and the biggest surprise is when one of them walks out again. Nobody survives the zone, so how has she?
Macsen Against the Jugger – Simon Morden
Two centuries after the Earth fell to alien machines known as the Visitors, humanity survives in sparse nomadic tribes. Macsen is an adventurer, undertaking hazardous quests to please Hona Loy. Macsen never fails, but this time he is pitted against a deadly Jugger. Can he somehow survive, or will it fall to his faithful companion Laylaw to tell the tale of his noble death?
www.newconpress.co.uk
Table of Contents
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About the Author
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