by Eric Brown
They fell silent as the taxi moved from the main dome to a smaller, adjacent dome which covered an outer suburb.
“The city’s designers wanted this place to withstand the onslaught of the fierce Kallithean winter,” Kallanova said after a while. “They built it under specially reinforced domes. The domes remain intact structurally, but the designers reckoned without the cost of heating a city when the temperature plummets to more than two hundred below zero. So the inhabitants of New Stockholm, along with everyone else on Kallithea, must migrate below ground every five years.”
He looked at her in the shadow of the taxi. “And Kat with them? Is that how she hopes to evade arrest?”
Kallanova shrugged. “That I don’t know. I received the impression that she intended to move further away than that.”
Minutes later the taxi drew up before a small hotel surrounded by frost-silvered lawns. “Room forty-eight, Matt. She said she would be waiting.”
He nodded, reached out, and squeezed the woman’s hand. “Thank you.”
She turned her head from him and stared through the window without replying.
He slipped from the taxi and hurried along the path as the vehicle started up behind him and hummed away. He entered the hotel through a sliding door, consulted a floorplan on the wall, then took an elevator up to the first floor. He turned right at the top and strode down the corridor.
He paused outside room number forty-eight, slowing his breathing as he stared at the door.
He was twenty-five again, breathless before a meeting with the woman he loved. As he thought back to the person he had been, he could have wept.
A thought occurred to him. What if Kat had agreed to see him not to explain herself, or to apologise, but to do to him what she had done to Karl Jurgens?
He dismissed the thought in a second, reached out and knocked.
The door slid open. Heart hammering, he peered into the lighted room.
A small woman stood before a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the distant ice plain. She held a remote in her hand, and when he crossed the threshold she raised it again and closed the door behind him.
“Hello, Matt.”
She wore a short light-blue dress; her legs were bare and also her feet. He smiled as he recollected that she had always liked to go barefoot.
She stared at him in silence. She might have had surgery to alter her appearance, to make her face broader, her lips fuller, but she was still, to him, recognisably Kat Nordstrom.
She said, “You don’t know how surprised I was when Magda told me that you were here on Kallithea.” Her voice was how he recalled it from all those years ago: light, almost amused, with a distinct Nordic lilt.
The length of the room still separated them. She was smiling at him. He felt frozen, unsure how to respond to her presence. A part of him, as if the passage of time had ceased to exist, wanted to hurry to her and take her in his arms. Another part, hurt by what he had learned during the course of the past day, was more cautious.
“Please,” she said, “come and sit down.”
He crossed the room to the window and took a seat. He stared at her, speechless. She was almost fifty, he realised, but looked much younger. Desire surged through him, at once powerful and nauseating.
“Why did you agree to see me?”
She smiled, and his stomach flipped. How often had he sat, beguiled, by the twist of her lips in what seemed like the far, far distant past? The thought turned like a knife in his gut.
“To tell you that I did what I did because it was necessary,” she said.
He stared at her. “You killed a man, and claim that it was necessary?” he asked incredulously.
“I am speaking about what I did to you twenty years ago, Matt, when I said that we could not go on—that our affair had to end. I loved you so much that I was frightened I’d hurt you.”
He felt tears like acid in his eyes. “I know why you . . .” he began. “I’ve spoken to Dr Patel. She told me . . .” He shrugged. “She told me about your past.”
Her smile was one of relief now. “So you understand? You forgive me?” She rushed on, “I couldn’t begin to explain at the time, Matt, not without hurting you even more—not without making you hate me even more. I couldn’t do that. Do you truly understand?”
“I did hate you so much in the years after. You were the first person I really loved, do you know that?” He smiled. “I have that to thank you for, Kat, for allowing me to love you.”
“But you do understand?”
He stared at her, gestured forlornly. “I’m trying to, Kat.” He hesitated, then said, “You didn’t hurt me, back then, as you hurt your other lovers . . .”
“Because, truly, I loved you, Matt. You were the first person I loved, you see, and I so much feared what in time I might do to you . . .” She knotted her hands in her lap as tears slid from her eyes and down her cheeks.
He marshalled his thoughts, fighting to keep the tremor from his voice as he said, “Magda told me that you said you didn’t kill Jurgens.” He willed her to convince him that she was innocent, against all reason and logic.
“I didn’t do it, Matt. Over the years I might have done things that some might have considered . . . cruel, but I am not a murderer.”
“Jurgens was decapitated. The evidence . . .”
She stared at him. “Matt, please believe me. I did not kill Karl. I was set up. It was all staged: his murder, the witnesses who said they heard me and Karl arguing, the people who claimed to have seen me fleeing the apartment. They were all paid to say these things.”
“And the forensics linking you to the crime?”
“A setup, Matt. I was framed.”
He stared at her. “But who would have wanted to . . . ?”
“Who do you think it was? Who had the motive, the power, the wherewithal to plant the forensics?”
He mouthed the name. “Behrens?”
She smiled. “I’d left him for Karl just months earlier. After more than twenty years I’d had enough. He was domineering, arrogant—well, you know what he was like, Matt. I’m not claiming that I was an angel myself, but I had to get away. And of course he didn’t like that. Gregor craved power. He thought he had me trapped. He thought I wouldn’t leave him because he gave me what I wanted: someone to love and to hate, someone who could withstand my . . . my rage.” She shook her head. “But he was wrong. I met Karl and . . . and do you know what, Matt? He so much reminded me of you. He was a little naïve, innocent, and so, so good. I thought that perhaps this time I can break the cycle, just love this man without wanting to hurt him, or desiring to be hurt. But . . .” She spread her hands, weeping freely. “But I never got the chance because Gregor, the bastard, hired someone to kill Karl and then set me up. So you see, I had to get away, flee Earth. Do you believe me, Matt?”
His throat was sore as he gestured helplessly. He wanted so much to believe that she was telling the truth. “Kat . . .”
She said, “I never told you that my father was still alive back then, did I? I told everyone that he was dead. But the truth is that he deserted me, left Earth and started a new life. So, when I left Earth over a year ago, fleeing Gregor and what he’d done, I had a new purpose. I would find the man responsible for what I was, find him and . . .”
He said, “And?”
She smiled through her tears. “I don’t know, Matt. You see, I was torn between the desire to kill him, to really commit murder this time, and the desire to . . .” She lowered her gaze, stared at her fingers in her lap. “To resume our relationship where he had broken it off.” She stared at him. “Sick, yes?”
He shook his head, murmured, “I’m sorry.”
She laughed, wiping at her tears with the heel of her hands. “In the end, I found that he’d died years ago. So I never did get the chance to complete what I set out to do, whatever that might have been.”
Hendrick wanted to reach out, take her in his arms and reassure her that everything would be
all right.
He said at last, “Come back to Earth with me. We’ll fight the charge. I’ll get the best lawyer. We’ll get you off and then . . .”
“Then?” she asked, her eyes bright with tears.
He shrugged. “And then, maybe, we could start again where we left off, all those years ago.” He said it before he’d really thought through the consequences. How could he live with this fragile woman? How could he abandon the search for his daughter?
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work, Matt. It’s a futile dream. I’m far too damaged for even someone as good as you to repair.” She seemed to brighten. “And anyway, my destiny is here on Kallithea.”
They sat in silence for a minute, staring at each other, and then Katerina raised her wrist-com, entered a code, and murmured into the speaker, “I am ready now.”
He stared at her, confused. “Kat?”
She stood up, facing him. “Hold me, Matt?”
He stood and reached out, and she came into his arms. The weight of her, the scent, banished the years. He wanted to tell her that he loved her despite everything, but at the same time he knew that this was the sentiment of his younger, more callow self, and that in truth he did not know Katerina Nordstrom at all.
The door behind her slid open, and a man and a woman stepped into the room.
Hendrick released Kat and stared at the couple, unable to believe what he was seeing. “No,” he said.
Smiling sadly at him, Katerina reached up and removed her auburn tresses to reveal a shaven skull with its ugly pigtail. She slipped a hand into the pocket of her dress and pulled something out. “Don’t try to stop me, Matt. I have to do this—and one day you might even understand.”
“No!” he cried.
She activated the neural incapacitator and thrust it at his chest. He cried out in pain as an electrical storm blitzed his system, and as he fell he saw Kat join the waiting Acolytes and leave the room.
And then, before despair could engulf him, he passed out.
NINE
HE CAME TO HIS SENSES, DRAGGED HIMSELF ACROSS THE floor to a chair and sat down. He felt Kat in his arms again, saw her sad smile as she hit him with the incapacitator. It was all he could do not to cry out in anguish.
He fumbled with his wrist-com and read the time. He’d been unconscious for more than two hours.
He entered Miller’s code and waited impatiently.
The detective was a long time answering. At last the screen flared and Miller’s sleep-bleary face stared out. “Matt? What the hell?”
“Get yourself down to the foyer, Ed. I’ll pick you up in a taxi in about ten minutes.”
“Matt? What’s going on?”
“I’ve found Katerina. I know where she is. Now get down to the foyer, okay?”
He cut the connection and pushed himself to his feet. He staggered to the door and down the corridor, his movements uncoordinated from the neural scrambling he’d received. At reception he asked the attendant to call a taxi and minutes later he was sitting back in the warm, padded interior as the car raced towards the main dome.
“Hotel Odin,” he said, “and then south to the Acolyte Monastery. You can cross the ice in this thing?”
“That’s what they’re built for,” the driver replied.
Miller was pacing up and down outside the hotel, gargantuan in his thermal suit. As the taxi pulled up, he yanked open the door and slipped into the back beside Hendrick. “What gives, Matt?”
“I contacted Magda after I left the bar,” he said as the taxi drew away from the hotel. Drawing a breath and trying to keep the emotion from his voice, he outlined his subsequent meeting with Kat.
Miller stared at him. “And she’s an Acolyte?”
“It makes a twisted kind of sense.”
“And she claims she didn’t kill Jurgens, that it was all a setup by Behrens?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“And you believe her?”
Hendrick nodded, seeing Kat, tiny in the armchair, as she pleaded with him to believe her. “I do. You know Behrens. He’s as corrupt as they come, and it’d be just like him to frame her.”
“Jesus.” Miller shook his head. “And how long ago did she zap you?”
“Well over two hours. She’ll have reached the monastery by now.”
“It’s just a question of whether she’s gone out onto the ice yet.”
Hendrick stared through the window as the taxi approached the clear wall of the dome. A sliding barrier moved aside and they left the city, turned south and sped across the ice.
He looked out across the star-silvered plain, bereft here of even a single felvänd tree. It was a suitably bleak and desolate landscape which perfectly matched his mood. He thought of the woman he had known back on Earth, and the hell her life had become, or rather always had been.
“They’re going to kick up a fuss when we barge in there and interrupt their service, Matt.”
“And you know what I say to that?”
Miller smiled. “Fuck ’em?”
“Something like that.”
Just above the horizon far to the south was the twin blur of the binary star system, pulling ever further away. He considered the massed stars overhead, many of which were orbited by colony worlds. The idea of a hundred billion lives ongoing across the Expansion was impossible to comprehend, when just at the moment a single life was all that concerned him. The odd thing was that, over the course of the past day or two, his thoughts had been diverted from what had consumed him for so many years: Samantha and his attempt to win her back.
He reminded himself that she was somewhere on Kallithea, and just as soon as Miller had Kat in custody, he could turn his attention to Maatje and his daughter. The thought brought him a measure of calm.
“How far are we from the monastery?” Miller asked the driver.
“Three kay, almost,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”
Miller drew something from his thermal jacket, adjusted its setting, and cradled it on his lap. He saw Hendrick’s gaze and said, “Stunner. I’m taking no chances. You know if she’s armed, other than with the zapper?”
“I don’t know. She might be.”
Hendrick leaned forward and peered at the frozen landscape through the windshield. He saw a slight irregularity on the horizon, which grew as the seconds elapsed: the triangular apex of the monastery.
They’d get there in time, arrest Kat and get her back to Earth. There, he’d engage the finest lawyer his money could buy and, as he’d promised, clear her name. Then he’d hire a therapist to try to get to the bottom of her problems, straighten her out.
Even as he made these promises to himself, a small, treacherous voice sounded in counterpoint, telling him that all such notions of a happy ending were nothing more than wishful thinking.
Minutes later the taxi drew up outside the monastery. Hendrick threw a wad of krona at the driver and jumped out.
Miller was beside him, a restraining hand on his arm. “Look!”
The deafening roar of multiple engines filled the freezing air. Hendrick turned and watched as the flier rose ponderously and headed, nose down, out across the ice towards the Holy Script.
Miller bundled him back into the taxi and shouted instructions to the driver. Hendrick sat back as they set off, a sick sensation of utter futility lodging itself like a coronary behind his sternum.
He stared through the windscreen at the flier as it drew away from them, made the short hop to the Holy Script, and a minute later banked and landed. The taxi drew up with a squeal of brakes and skidded the last twenty metres. Hendrick pushed open the door and dived out before the vehicle had halted, finding his footing on the ice with difficulty.
One hundred metres away the flier was disgorging its cargo of Acolytes, a long line of pale, white-smocked figures, heads bowed as they crossed the ice to their deaths.
Miller was running away from the Acolytes, heading for the forest of vac
ant columns that stippled the ice. “Check the Acolytes as they leave the flier!” he called out to Hendrick. “I’ll be here if she manages to get through.”
Hendrick saw the logic of Miller’s strategy and hurried towards the marching suicides. He passed a pair of blue-uniformed officials, heard them call out to him and ignored their objections. The first of the Acolytes were passing him now, their expressions rapturous, almost elated as they moved like somnambulists towards their allotted stations.
He ran the length of the line, panting, staring at every Acolyte as they passed. Each figure, in its white smock and with its shaven skull, possessed an eerie similarity which made his task of identification seem almost impossible. And there were so many Acolytes, dozens of them, hundreds . . . and she might be anywhere amongst their number.
His wrist-com chimed. Miller stared out, yelling, “Get yourself back here, Matt!”
Hendrick turned. The nearest silver columns were already claiming their victims, spectacular flowers bursting into existence against the stars. Beyond, he made out Miller’s suited figure, waving at him. He thought at first that the detective had found Kat, then as he approached realised that he was mistaken.
Miller was standing beside a vacant column, staring at Hendrick with triumphant eyes behind his goggles. His voice sounded, muffled, “Look!” He pointed.
Hendrick stared at the column. On its facing flank was the image of Katerina, starting out at him in seeming defiance.
Miller moved, placing himself between the column and the approaching Acolytes.
Hendrick turned as a slight figure emerged from between the columns and approached him. Katerina paused when she saw Hendrick and Miller, and smiled.
“Kat.” Hendrick reached out, pleading. “You don’t have to do this.”
Her flesh was as white as snow, but she was not shivering. She showed not the slightest bodily reaction to the freezing temperature. Something about her gaze, her languid smile as she regarded him, suggested that a powerful anaesthetic was at work. He wondered, then, how much the Acolytes’ desires were the effects of chemical coercion.