‘What in—’ began Lloyd when he saw me leading Birgitta by the hand.
‘Harbouring,’ said Jonesy. ‘Worthing is so under arrest right now.’
The front door opened. But it wasn’t a confused and very cold yet navigationally astute winsomniac, it was someone considerably less welcome – Mr Hooke. He was accompanied by Lucy Knapp, wrapped up tight in a duvet jacket and large woolly hat. She smiled when she saw me, but looked nervous, too.
‘Safe Haven?’ asked Hooke, the traditional request for unconditional shelter in the Winter. ‘Staff transfer between facilities and we got lost.’
‘Safe Haven,’ said Lloyd, acknowledging the request.
‘My first blizzard,’ said Lucy to me, pulling off her parka. ‘A little more excitement than I’d bargained for.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ I said, with a sense of relief.
‘And you,’ she said, and we tapped fists.
‘Good afternoon, Deputy Jones,’ said Hooke.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Jonesy, without breaking her pace to the coat rack and now almost pushing Birgitta in front of her.
‘It would be safer to stay inside,’ said Hooke. ‘Going out in this is foolhardy at best, and irresponsible at worst.’
‘And yet you are yourself a new arrival,’ retorted Jonesy, pulling on her boots and then rummaging for a spare parka for Birgitta.
‘Safe Havening,’ he replied, ‘as you heard. We expect to be here until it eases – what’s your reason for you venturing out? Something pretty important, I should imagine?’
He looked from me to Jonesy as he spoke.
‘Consulate business,’ said Jonesy, handing me my coat, ‘and of an urgent and pressing nature.’
‘With a nightwalker and a Novice?’
‘Consulate business,’ she repeated, smiling but without humour.
‘That’s as may be,’ said Hooke, taking a step closer, ‘but my orders are to ensure Worthing remains free to join us at HiberTech.’
And then, with the pretext of moving his arm to straighten his tie, Hooke pushed his coat back to allow easier access to the Bambi on his hip. The gesture did not go unnoticed by Jonesy. He wasn’t there to Safe Haven, he’d been likely ordered to interrupt his journey to come over here and stop us from leaving. HiberTech had been tipped off – by Lloyd, most probably.
‘We take recruitment seriously,’ continued Hooke, ‘and the Chief has made a personal investment that she doesn’t want to see bruised.’
‘Charlie’s a Consul, not a piece of overripe fruit, and right now, under arrest – our prisoner, our jurisdiction.’
I opened my mouth to say something, but Jonesy pressed her fingers on my mouth to keep me silent.
‘You’ve charged Worthing with harbouring?’ asked Hooke.
‘Yes.’
Hooke looked at Birgitta, who was still staring blankly around the lobby and freaking out the winsomniacs, who were studiously avoiding her blank gaze.
‘Worthing was looking after this nightwalker at our request,’ said Hooke. ‘We’ll swear to that in an affidavit. There has been no crime. Now, release the prisoner from your custody and this can end without recrimination.’
‘Irrespective, Charlie is still a Consul,’ said Jonesy.
‘Deputy Worthing could resign,’ said Hooke, ‘here and now.’
Jonesy stared at him coldly.
‘Charlie’s not resigning. Wonky, you’re not resigning.’
‘Only Charlie can make that decision.’
It was Lucy Knapp who’d spoken. She looked at me and smiled.
‘Charlie, listen to me. The Consul Service are not your friends. I’ve seen stuff and know stuff and at HiberTech we’re on the cusp of introducing something quite new and wonderful to the world. For purely personal reasons and an intense dislike of Aurora, Toccata is trying to throw a spanner in the works. But we need to move forward without let or hindrance: it’s a game changer.’
‘Project Lazarus?’
‘Ten years in the preparation. It’s a winner, any way you want to look at it. And HiberTech needs your help to ensure the most satisfactory outcome is enjoyed by the majority.’
‘What’s on the cylinder?’
‘I don’t know, Hooke doesn’t know, and I’m willing to bet Miss Jones doesn’t know.’
I looked at Jonesy, who didn’t deny it.
‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘What’s so special about me that only I can help?’
‘Aurora sees something special in you,’ she said, ‘a gift that can be nurtured until it becomes a skill that will set you head and shoulders above any potential career with the Consuls. Working for HiberTech will be the best decision you’ll ever make.’
‘She’s lying,’ said Jonesy, ‘whoever she is – sorry, we weren’t introduced.’
‘Lucy Knapp,’ said Lucy, holding out a hand, which Jonesy shook.
‘Miss Knapp’s lying,’ continued Jonesy, slowly moving her hand to where her Bambi was holstered. ‘HiberTech look out only for themselves. They’ll take what they want from you and the next thing you know you’ll be driving a golf cart around the facility. Only you won’t know that, because you won’t be able to.’
‘Jonesy exaggerates wildly like the outspoken fool I now realise she is,’ said Lucy, her voice rising, ‘but she has no cogent arguments, merely slander. It’s a bona fide career. How about it?’
‘There will always be the Gower.’
It was Birgitta. She’d interrupted the conversation and was momentarily distracting – something that Hooke and Jonesy both exploited.
Whu-whump
They’d drawn and fired their weapons almost simultaneously. Concussive vortex rings do strange things in restricted spaces, but opposing thumps do even stranger things – and like weather systems, Arctic badgers and Sister Contractia, they are difficult to predict. The two pulses met with the sound of a log being split, then ran around each other before stabilising in a tight vertical dust devil that sucked up anything not nailed down – dust, paper, hats, gloves, books. We watched the vortex grow darker and heavier and had to hold onto furniture and each other to avoid being swept off our feet, until the maelstrom explosively lost cohesion and knocked us all off our feet. Hooke drew his second Bambi but Jonesy’s back-up weapon caught him on the chest and cannoned him backwards into a plaster wall, which buckled under the impact, and Hooke fell forwards in a cloud of dust.
Jonesy dropped the spent thermalite from the Bambi and swiftly replaced it with another.
‘We’ll laugh about this later,’ she said to me, advancing upon Hooke, who was struggling to get up, still dazed, ‘in that cosy retirement we promised ourselves.’
Whump
There was another ear-popping concussion and Jonesy was lifted off her feet and thrown backwards through two chairs, a standard lamp and out through one of the front windows by way of the heavy drapes. The snow and wind swirled into the room, the cold air replacing the hot in an instant. I turned. Lucy Knapp was holding a Thumper and had a look of steely determination about her. Lucy had lied: she was HiberTech first, friend second. When you accept a corporate fast track, you have to leave a part of yourself behind.
I pushed my way past the tattered curtains, which were flapping wildly in the gale, and waded through the snow to where Jonesy was lying. She wasn’t dead, but it wouldn’t be long. Her face was a fine mesh of broken capillaries. Her eyelids were sunken and closed and I knew that her sockets were empty underneath. She was breathing in short gasps, and a small amount of blood frothed from the side of her mouth. Her lips were moving and I leaned closer.
‘It’s Charlie,’ I said.
Her cheek twitched into a half-smile.
‘We had a good life together, didn’t we?’ she whispered.
‘The best,’ I replied, ‘I have no regrets.’
She smiled again and pressed something unseen into my palm which I knew was the Polaroid of Birgitta and Webster, and after that, she moved her hand in an unc
ertain manner up towards her chest. I didn’t see at first what she was trying to do, but then noticed her thumb was out, and guessing her intent, I hooked her thumb into the D-ring of the pulse mortar on her chest. She patted my hand and twitched me another smile.
‘Move away from her,’ said Lucy and I trudged back through the snow into the lobby. Already, Porter Lloyd was fetching emergency shutters of folded canvas on bamboo while the winsomniacs all made themselves scarce, just not very quickly.
‘I’m sorry if you liked her,’ said Lucy, ‘but Project Lazarus brings a whole new meaning to the word importance.’
Hooke picked himself up, touched a finger to his bleeding nose, shook his head and then found his weapon. He reloaded it and looked at Lucy and me in turn, then outside at Jonesy, who was still moving weakly on her back in the snow.
‘Put her out of her misery,’ said Lucy. ‘We’d expect the same courtesy from her.’
‘It’s time you were blooded,’ said Hooke. ‘Do it yourself if you’ve the stomach.’
She glared at him.
‘Oh, I’ve the stomach,’ said Lucy, and took Hooke’s Bambi from him.
I started to say something. A warning, I think. Lucy noticed, stopped and stared at me.
‘What is it?’
I stared back at her for a moment.
‘It’s nothing.’
She strode across to where Jonesy’s form was lying in the snow outside, then leaned over and placed the Bambi to Jonesy’s head. I turned away as Jonesy detonated the pulse charge, a heavy concussion that blew the snow and tattered remnants of the curtains back into the lobby. When I looked back outside, there was only a refrozen circle of clear ice on the ground, about the size of an ornamental fountain.
‘Well, shit,’ said Hooke, following my gaze, ‘that’s a loss.’
‘I liked her,’ I said, referring to both of them, I think.
‘No,’ retorted Hooke, ‘I was talking about my staff protection bonus.’
He then looked at me, and presumably misconstrued my lack of decisive action or intervention in any of this as tacit approval of his intentions to take me to HiberTech.
‘Well now, Worthing,’ he said, switching his attention to Birgitta, ‘wouldn’t have marked you as a harbourer. Porter, put this deadhead somewhere safe, and make sure she’s looked after.’
I asked Hooke in something of a daze if we should wait until the blizzard had abated, but he told me that the sooner I was safe inside HiberTech, the better it would be for him. He walked away and I, in a confused and shocked daze, followed.
H4S radar
* * *
‘… Limited-vision navigation is more than simply being blind within a snowstorm. The wind, swirling snow and lack of visual cues all conspire to disorientate the unwary traveller. Even seasoned professionals became lost, and only the advent of modern navigational aids made going out in a blizzard anything other than for the morbidly foolhardy …’
– Basic Blind Driving Techniques for Overwinterers
I followed Hooke behind the line he had strung from his Sno-Trac and we climbed aboard, all the while buffeted by the blizzard. The wind had risen, the snowfall was heavier, and the temperature was dropping by the minute. It was dark by now and in every other circumstance, we would not be venturing out.
Hooke wound in the cable, shut the rear door then climbed past me and started up the engine. But instead of troubling with the high beams which would have been useless in the blizzard, he instead switched on the H4S and waited while the screen warmed up. The outside temperature gauge was now indicating minus twenty-four Celsius and still falling. Any porter worth his salt right now would be going Full Rods Out on the HotPots.
‘Lucy killed Jonesy,’ I said in a quiet voice.
‘Other way round, kiddo – Jonesy killed Knapp. But the good news is we lost one each, so at least Pinky and Perky will have less to squabble over.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To safety,’ he said. ‘Recent events have proved that you’re not safe in Sector Twelve with Toccata kicking around. Once you’re with us, we can figure out what’s going on, and if you want, you can accept that job Aurora was talking about.’
‘So I’m not a prisoner?’
‘Goodness me, no,’ he replied with perhaps not quite the tone of veracity in his voice he’d hoped for, ‘you can leave whenever you want.’
I looked outside at the cold and the snow. Somehow leaving wasn’t really an option right now.
The circular H4S screen in the centre of the Trac’s panel was now glowing an unearthly shade of green; the radar returns from the surrounding topography displayed as green specks on the screen, refreshed every second by the sweep of the scanner. It would give us more than enough information to navigate, although at greatly reduced speed. Clearly visible was the Dormitorium exit road, part of the Siddons and, closest of all, Jonesy’s Sno-Trac. I could see the shape of the vehicle less than twenty feet away on the screen, but when I looked outside there was nothing but a wall of swirling snow.
Hooke said something vague about ‘returning to base with Worthing’ on the shortwave, then popped the Sno-Trac into gear and we moved off. I was annoyed with myself because Jonesy had been a far better friend than I realised. She’d had answers, and so had Toccata, whom I’d also underestimated. I briefly thought of opening the rear door of the Sno-Trac and making a run for it, but going out in blizzards was like consorting with drowsies, borrowing from bondsmen or poking an already-enraged mammoth with a sharpened stick: don’t. Just don’t. But despite everything, there was a plus point: HiberTech had placed some sort of value on me. As long as I had value, I was safe. And if I was safe, then so was Birgitta. Sort of.
The odd thing was, I didn’t feel anything about Lucy at all. It wasn’t that our friendship meant nothing, nor did I feel that I had, by omission, led her to her death. There was just a certain numbness, as though I’d known all along that she really only looked after herself. Mother Fallopia and the Sisterhood would be distraught, but philosophical. People die in the Winter; it’s what it’s there for.
Hooke concentrated on the journey, the route clear on the glowing H4S, while outside the storm buffeted the small vehicle. In this way we passed slowly back down the drive from the Siddons, took a left, then after what seemed like an age, the right turn at the billboard.
‘So,’ I said, thinking about Hooke’s reputed enthusiasm for invasive interrogation techniques, ‘I heard you used to be with military intelligence.’
‘Regretfully not,’ he said, ‘more’s the pity. I would have liked to have served my country in that manner, but no. We put it about that it was me, but it was actually Aurora.’
I should have been more surprised than I was.
‘Until her retirement, she was the best they had. Just went into the dreaming subject’s mind and took what she wanted. I was her assistant for a time and had a go at dream incursions, but it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t. I left it up to her. We all did.’
‘What’s on this cylinder?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but if I were to hazard a guess, about the most impor—’
The Sno-Trac lurched to a halt. I looked up and could see nothing but blizzard through the windscreen. Hooke flicked the ranging knob on the H4S and adjusted the gain.
‘What is it?’ I whispered.
‘There,’ he said, pointing at the glowing dots on the screen. Not more than ten yards away in the middle of the road was a strong radar return. Something that shouldn’t be there. I’d driven this way with Jonesy an hour before, and the road had been clear.
‘Winsomniacs on the move … but now not moving?’ I suggested.
Hooke shook his head.
‘They’re lazy, not stupid.’
‘Could be womads who got caught out.’
This was unlikely, but possible. Winter Nomads had been known to move in clutches of twenty or more to conserve heat, usually covered by a
yurt with caribou skirts to stop the outer walkers’ legs from freezing. If things got bad they just downed the yurt with them in it, lit the fire, wrapped themselves in skins and huddled.
‘Possibly. Still, can’t be helped.’
He lowered the snow plough and moved forward. But as he did so, the trace moved away from us. Hooke stopped, and the trace shifted on for a few yards, stopped, paused, then approached us again. A squall of wind hit the Sno-Trac and the vehicle shook. The anemometer on the roof was reading gusts of sixty miles per hour, but the whatever-it-was on the H4S seemed unaffected.
There was silence in the cab for a moment and then, with a slowness that denoted clear deliberation, the radar trace started moving towards us.
‘After a scrap, are you?’ said Hooke, and took the Cowpuncher off the rack behind him. He pushed four D-Cell thermalites into the magazine and racked the first into the battery chamber. The Cowpuncher was not the subtlest of weapons – it was actually intended for herding dairy mammoths rather than fighting – but was the close-quarter weapon of choice when you weren’t big on subtlety and hostility was getting right in your face.
Hooke slid back the window and held the weapon outside while we both stared at the H4S screen, the trace moving ever closer. When it was at the ten-yard range, Hooke let fly.
The pressure wave momentarily turned the snow to rain and should have revealed whatever it was in the blizzard, but there was nothing to be seen except the side of the road and one half of a horse trough. Within a second the blizzard had once more closed in and by the time we looked back at the H4S screen, the radar return had gone.
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