She didn’t make much effort to hide her approach as she followed the location data out into the sprawl. When she found the little row of units – and there was a drinks dispenser sitting on the corner of the block – she drove straight into the parking lot. Sometimes the direct approach was best. Sloane had not set up any conspicuous security measures, even if that didn’t rule out some low-tech traps.
To her surprise, Sloane – a nondescript man in his mid-thirties, almost ridiculous in his textbook adherence to the profile of a sadistic sociopath for hire – was sitting in a plain plastic chair in the unit’s living room. Hands on knees, he was facing the door and looking pale, sweat-sheened but composed. The sweat could just as easily have been the result of the unit not seeming to have air-conditioning. Cautiously, even more suspicious of traps than she’d been a few minutes ago, Ash eased into the doorway and eyed the smiling man. His smile was fixed, his eyes feverish and dark-ringed. The sweat, at second glance, seemed more to do with adrenaline and lack of sleep than it did with the heat.
The unit was barely furnished, a table and single chair – the one he was sitting at – in one room, a narrow and rumpled bed visible from where Ash was standing in an adjoining room. Two other doors stood closed, but she was willing to bet they led to a kitchen and a toilet / shower. The carpet was the sort you sprayed with chemicals once a year and then just left alone in case it got angry.
“Lady Vandemar. I’m glad it’s you,” Sloane said in a hoarse, cracked voice. “I was worried my employers would find me first.”
“You mean Mercibald Fagin and his people?” Ash asked.
As ravaged as he was by exhaustion and stress, Sloane showed not a flicker of recognition or response at the name. He was either very good, or very insane. Ash saw no reason why he couldn’t be both.
“You’ll make this quick,” he said, voice rising to a slightly higher pitch. “You have honour.”
“Honour?” Ash raised her eyebrows. “You must be mistaking me for–”
She drew the gun, fired, and slipped it back into her pocket in the space of a single hammered heartbeat. Sloane moved at the same time, very nearly as quick as she was, a weapon of some sort flicking into his hand from under his forearm. She curved her body sideways even as she was firing, and she felt his projectile – a dart, she was fairly certain – whisk past her waist at kidney-level. When she turned to see where it had impacted, she found a small sooty smudge but no trace of a dart. Loose carbon delivery system, then, with a rapid-breakdown profile. Untraceable.
Ash’s own projectile had been a similar ceramic to the stuff they’d used in the transport jar carrying the Demon / Angel sludge. It was a flattened but still quite lethal pellet, depending on where you aimed it. Her shot took Sloane in the pit below his Adam’s apple, partially collapsing his windpipe and jolting the adjoining neck vertebra severely enough to paralyse, at least temporarily. He fell unceremoniously from his chair and landed on his face with a cough-wheeze and a spurt of blood from the new hole in his neck. Ash stepped forward, calmly stepped on each of his arms just above the elbow and pulled his hands back and up one after another, snapping the joints. More air bubbled from Sloane’s neck and his body vibrated. Paralysed or not, he was still getting pain signals perfectly well. Ash felt that was acceptable.
Reaching into her other pocket she pulled out some clip-cables and deftly bound him in hog-tied position. The additional direction his elbows now bent in made this even more effective than usual. Then, although it was probably not necessary, she pushed a stiff tube into his neck to aid his breathing, then sprayed medical sealant liberally over the entrance and exit wounds.
It wouldn’t keep him breathing for more than an hour or so, but she didn’t need that long.
“–someone else,” she concluded, and hauled him by the wrists and ankles along the carpet, which had taken on some interesting new stains – but it was not, she suspected, the first time it had tasted blood.
She hefted Sloane into the boot of her car, double-checked his condition, then drove south.
There was a loading dock behind the Ballywise Tavern and it was here, in faded lettering almost completely obscured by scrapes and chips and smears of paint and grease, you could see the only clue as to the establishment’s origins. Bad Cow, the faint old letters read.
Ash drove deep into the bay, up a ramp and then three-point-turned into an alcove backed by a rusted roller-door. She spent a moment deactivating the security measures she and Roon had set in place, checked to make sure the dock was deserted, and climbed out. She opened the boot, pulled Sloane clear, and wrinkled her nose. He’d soiled himself. Well, it wasn’t as if the whole rear of the car wouldn’t need to be replaced anyway. She dragged him through a small warren of passageways and storerooms, the only sounds the scrape of his chest and stomach along the floor and the gristly crunching of his elbows and shoulders as she wrenched them carelessly. They passed through some more low-tech security and down a set of metal stairs into the paradoxically dry, well-maintained chamber where Gabriel had been keeping his dissolved buddy.
Sloane gave a final desperate wheeze, that came out of the tube in a hilarious little toot noise, as Ash hefted him once more, rested him for a second on the edge of the tub of seething black slime, then let him fall forward into it. She stepped back adroitly at the same time, but the stuff didn’t splash. Nor did its volume increase or its level on the side of the tub rise in any noticeable way – it simply closed over the piss-wet trousers of Augustus Sloane and went on roiling and swirling sluggishly.
After waiting for a minute or two, watching the stuff rolling and turning, Ash concluded that Gabriel had evidently been telling the truth. Sloane was either dead at this stage, or beginning what would hopefully be an eternal punishment. If Fagin could have come up with something better, that was a disappointment Ash found she could live with.
She returned to the car and sat behind the wheel for a moment, her hands loosely curled and perfectly still over the imitation leather. Then she leaned back, pulled out her interface, and contacted Harlon Berkenshaw.
The special communication program Roon had set up on their interfaces, skirting its way through several not-quite-legal privacy loopholes that the release of Osrai made look utterly insignificant, took a few moments to establish their respective locations and, presumably, for Harlon to either wake up and get his head together, or excuse himself from his board meeting, or whatever else he needed to do depending on what time zone he was in. As the interface sounded its comforting please-wait hum, she considered the question of Synfoss.
Synfoss. It sounded like a corporation, and it acted like a corporation, but it wasn’t one. Not really. Leaving aside its sinister and ruthless business model – because what self-respecting Twenty-Third Century company didn’t have one of those? – it was more than a monopoly, more than an industrial complex, more than a nation.
Although the corporation was technically based in Detroit, Synfoss had its largest bases and most important nerve centres in Japan. Sooner or later – and Ash knew this from very in-depth experience – Synfoss would be quietly responsible for the emergence of a new Empire. An Empire that spanned a hemisphere, if not the globe. And, as long as the Atonement wasn’t completely forgotten in the meantime, that was no terrible thing.
The other so-called world powers were reeling from disaster to disaster, struggling under generations of momentum in self-interest and greed, distrust and endlessly cycling vengeance. They reacted well, and they had a lot of resolve and ingenuity, but they were still responding to the world as it was instead of forming the world to their will. Admittedly, a hundred years of being punched in the face by the world for the crime of trying to form it to your will can have a detrimental effect on your cultural psyche. But that was changing. It had to change.
The Protectorates of the ASEAN Union would not be Protectorates for long. Soon they would be armies, disguised as nations. Armies fuelled by Synfoss. Armies of a kind nobody had eve
r seen before, so ponderous and rich with every form of cultural capital, there would be no war.
The war would be won without a shot fired. The price of having the war would simply be too great.
Earth, as a human-habitable planet, would limp and cough through another century. Maybe longer, depending on whether Synfoss was able to use Roon’s legacy well. Depending on whether Ariel was successful. If she failed…
Well, it wasn’t likely to matter to them, was it? Sooner or later, everyone on this planet would die, smothered to death with their own short-sightedness and hate. And if Gabriel was telling the truth, Ash and Ariel and Roon would be there, drifting like ghosts until some higher power deigned to give them bodies once more. So that was something to look forward to.
In the meantime–
The interface lit up, and Ash activated her virtual setting. Harlon Berkenshaw was sitting at a desk that said everything that really needed to be said about the man. It was the default blank-slate conference desk setup you got with a middle-of-the-range interface and virtual set. No frills, no bowl of goldfish, no automatic image-polish.
Ash saw his face, his bland smile and slightly rueful here-comes-another-awkward-conversation-with-the-girlfriend’s-sister grimace, and it cut through her anger like a blade of ice.
He had no idea what had happened. The media had, so far, been quiet on the subject and there were no next of kin to inform. He’d heard about the fire, and from his slightly rumpled and unshaven look he may have been worrying about his failure to contact Roon … or he might have just gotten off a plane. Roon didn’t communicate much by interface, as a general guideline. Ash doubted she’d made an exception for Harlon.
Harlon had been no part of this. The knowledge relieved her more than she’d been expecting it to.
“Ashley,” he said, affable and concerned. “I heard about the fire, but everything’s been quiet. I’m so sorry. Is everybody alright?”
“No,” Ash said, and with her last scrap of humanity before the soldier took over, she managed to soften her words. “Harlon, Roon was killed,” Harlon’s eyes widened, and Ash watched with a clinical eye as the man broke, utterly and irreparably. “Agñasta and Silas as well. I’m sorry to have to tell you this news by virtual.”
“I,” Harlon said, and opened and closed his mouth for a few moments. He was the lord and master of a corporation that controlled the lives of billions of people, however, and after those moments of silence the gleaming metal under his soul was laid bare. “Ashley, I – I can’t even imagine what you must be going through. I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”
“You might be better off not knowing this,” Ash went on, “but it wasn’t an accident. Agñasta and Silas were killed, and incendiary devices were planted on the property. Roon was interrogated, probably for information regarding her confidential projects,” Harlon looked ill. Lord and master or not, the man was a civilian. “Some of the Oræl Systems proprietary prototypes, and information on the power conversion system Roon was working on with you, may have fallen into their hands. The rest of the prototypes are undamaged as far as I could tell, although that part of the house is still an ongoing-investigation scene–”
“Ash, I don’t care about the prototypes,” Harlon said loudly.
“You should,” Ash replied. “They’re the reason she’s dead.”
Harlon swallowed, and nodded. “What do you need from me?”
She gave him a small nod of thanks. “Once the official channels let you know what’s happened, we’re going to need you and the Synfoss lawyers to shore up the Oræl Systems patents and development materials, as well as the prototypes. Vandemar Holdings will uphold whatever legal partnership you had with Roon. Production and implementation of the projects will fall to you. It’s possible that the people responsible for this attack also have operatives within Synfoss. Maybe high up in Synfoss. We’re going to find them all – this is just a heads up.”
Harlon nodded again. “Are you going to … go after them yourself?” he asked, then raised a hand. “Don’t answer that,” he said, “of course you’re not. I’m just shaken.”
“This is a police and ASEAN Union intelligence matter now,” Ash said. It was possible their conversation was not secure, despite Roon’s programming and the new presence of Osrai in the system. She debated whether to tell Harlon about the machine, but opted not to. Osrai, in its own words, was still weighing its options and unsure of what it would become. It could make up its own mind about Berkenshaw. “We’re offering all our cooperation and the information I’ve shared with you is basically the cover page of their dossier.”
“I understand,” Harlon said.
They signed off, and Ash was about to pocket the interface when it gave a little pulse and a chime of an incoming contact. This one was audio only.
“Senior Sergeant Vandemar,” the voice was chillingly friendly, and even more chillingly plain. “My name is Mercibald Fagin.”
“Mercy,” Ash said. The human was gone now. A soldier spoke to a Demon through a machine, and no humanity was involved at any point in the conversation.
“Ah yes, you are aware. I am calling with an offer, Senior Sergeant Vandemar,” Ash didn’t speak, and Mercy let out a quiet, isn’t-this-regrettable little sigh. “The man you want is named Augustus Sloane,” he said. “I’m not particularly happy with him either, so I would be pleased to let you deal with him in the interests of putting this behind us. I will send you his information, location, his movements as he makes them – currently, you will be interested to hear he is still in Perth.”
“Sloane won’t be leaving Perth,” Ash said. “I don’t know how up-to-date your information is, but Sloane is gone. As soon as I figure out how best to do it, I’m going to see that you join him.”
“I felt sure you would,” Mercy said with another tiny sigh. Children, that sigh seemed to say, and their sulking. “Very well.”
The interface went dead.
“Osrai,” Ash said, tucking it back into her pocket where it clinked lightly against the metal shape of her lighter.
- - - Yes, Ash? - - - The words appeared on the car’s dashboard display. Osrai hadn’t been joking when it said it could talk to her anywhere.
“Can you locate the gentleman who was just speaking to me?”
- - - Yes. - - -
“Good,” Ash said, and started the car. “That’s good.”
EPILOGUE
- - - I - - -
- - - II - - -
- - - III - - -
I
(ROMA, EUROPA)
Rome was a familiar city for Ariel. Several of her agencies had offices there, it was an immortal fashion and media favourite, and she’d been to at least four weddings for celebrity ‘friends’ there in the past three years. This was a slightly different visit, but she still had to put in appearances at her various contact-points and suffer through two separate condolence / wake / celebration of life events for a sister almost none of the people involved had even known she had.
She also had to tolerate and speak civilly to a protest group who were angry about the size of the house Ariel had lost compared to how many people lived in it, and the fact that one of the fatalities had been a butler despite the fact that it was 2202 AD. She managed to put on her best face, talk to the accusing mindless faces until they all looked apologetic or at least sulkily unable to muster further shitty objections, and above all resisted the urge to call Ash afterwards and have an air strike arranged for the whole lot of them. It wasn’t their fault, she told herself. The more information you had, the less ignorant you became. By definition.
All of these minor social events helped validate her presence, allay suspicion and lessen the official scrutiny even as it intensified the unofficial sort. And it all served to build up her network, even as every agonising reminder of her loss served to sharpen her resolve.
She had her connections. Publicists, scouts, her enormous virtual following that called themselves Ariel’s Army. Sl
owly, a little bit at a time and with considerable filtering and narrowing-down from Osrai and the excruciatingly contrite Archangel Gabriel, she picked her way closer to Fury.
Thursday, February 18th, found her in a disappointingly modern, well-lit, comfortable but at least underground series of chambers with a nervous and jittery maintenance worker named Marietta who was, in her own words before realising who she was talking to on the blank virtual, “Ariel’s biggest fan.” Ariel got the impression that if Ash had known how strong the obsession this particular fan had for her was, she might not have allowed Ariel to be eight storeys below ground alone with her.
“I can’t believe I’m down in the sub-sewer cables and transport system with my own Ariel, all alone, to show her around the tunnels,” the cute but increasingly scary Italian said excitedly through her Rosetta translator interface. Ariel’s own rudimentary grasp of Italian was enough that she was translating some of what the girl was saying in her own head, just sufficient to make the soft voice-over of the translator distracting. “It is all-time my favourite and most regular sex fantasy.”
“Rome’s that kind of city, isn’t it?” Ariel said as levelly as she could.
Obviously, if the worst happened, she was confident she’d be able to handle Marietta with help from her ever-present portable defence system, with which she’d entered Italy unchallenged – indeed, the only question she’d been asked at border control was whether the customs officer could have an autograph. But still, she was hoping the girl was just over-excited, that the translator was misinterpreting her excitement and throwing some glitch expressions in, that they weren’t about to turn a corner and find a creepy Ariel shrine with hair wads from backstage at fashion shows and an assortment of underwear. This was not how Ariel was planning on ending her journey.
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