He waited for a while, staring through the building’s glass walls to see if anyone came. The only things moving were the ducks on the big pond outside.
It was odd walking along the broad pathways by himself. He was wanted by the police, yet here he was out in the open for anyone to see. Yet nobody was looking.
But only in here.
He had to stop every few paces. His ankle could barely take his weight anymore. It was badly swollen, which gave him a nasty flashback to the way Lars’s flesh had distended to begin the cocoon process. Logically, he knew he was being stupid imagining he was suffering the same fate; he’d never had any kind of treatment involving Kcells. But still, these were strange times.
He hobbled into a big café through tall, arched doors that someone had already broken open. Whoever had done that had also ransacked the kitchen and storeroom, cleaning out all the food. But when he started to hunt around, he found a few half-full packets and jars in cupboards that the looters obviously couldn’t be bothered about.
An hour later, with many rests for his ankle, he was eating a breakfast of French toast and fruit tea (organic raspberry and honey, which looked just like bird droppings to Ollie). Not his ideal choice, but at least the kitchen had backup power so he could heat it.
The rest of the morning was spent exploring the offices and staff room at the back, which had a couple of mandatory first aid kits. He applied anti-inflammatories and painkillers to his ankle, then pulled on a fiber-reinforced support sock.
Lunch was French toast and fruit tea.
Afternoon was resting up. He sat outside trying to see if anything was happening on the other side of the glowing shield. The Deliverance ships were due to arrive soon, he knew that, but without a link to solnet he didn’t know exactly when.
Supper was French toast and fruit tea.
There were enough printed egg sheets left for one more meal, for which he was grateful. He gathered a bunch of cushions from the café’s chairs and piled them up to sleep on.
Breakfast was French toast and fruit tea.
His ankle didn’t feel so bad now. When he checked it, the swelling had gone down. So he applied another anti-inflammatory pac and pulled the support sock back on. There were some jackets in the staff room, which were so basic he never wanted to meet the owners. He chose an olive green parka because it had a hood. Solnet and all the civic sensors networked to it might be off in Kew Gardens, but he was pretty sure there would be parts of London where everything was still functional. The hood would help, along with a wide mirrorshade band he’d found in the manager’s desk. Wearing the stealth suit during the day was pointless, so he rolled it up and stuffed it into the parka’s pocket. Then, before he left, he raided the café’s counter for the remaining biscuit packets.
Ollie had spent most of the evening thinking about how to get back to Copeland Road. He had friends there who’d put him up, he was sure they would. He was part of the Legion; people respected that. Once he was there he could work out what to do next.
Tye had been working out possible routes for him. It was an eighteen-kilometer walk if he traveled straight. And that was when he had an idea, planning things out properly like he used to. The Thames was empty; he and Adnan had seen that on the news feeds. If he walked along the riverbed, he’d reduce the risk of a bankside sensor identifying him, especially in the parka. The river couldn’t take him all the way to Southwark, but he could get to Vauxhall Bridge, which was well over halfway. He’d take it steady during the day because of his ankle, then wait up until dark and put the stealth suit back on for the final five kilometers. Not the greatest plan he’d ever come up with, but better than nothing.
He walked to the edge of Kew Gardens where it bordered the river. There was an old brick wall, which he managed to scramble over, delivering him onto a wide lane running along the top of the riverbank. The sight of the empty river was weird for him; somehow it made the shield and what it represented more real. He slid and blundered his way down the slope until he was standing on the muddy stones at the bottom. The smell of the exposed bed was something he hadn’t anticipated, but he pulled the hood down tighter, settled the mirrorshades, and started walking.
* * *
—
Hours later Ollie was approaching Battersea Railway Bridge, which was now an elevated greenway of trees, when a change in the shield’s uniform, mundane light made him look up. By now he couldn’t even count the number of times he’d fallen over, his feet slithering around on the precarious slime-slicked stones to send him tumbling. His ankle was throbbing again, those sweet leather trousers were caked in the wretched, stinking stuff, and wearing the brogues had been a big mistake; he should have stuck to the boots he’d used on the Croydon raid and to hell with vanity. Hindsight!
When he looked up, a giant shadow was sliding across the shield.
“Oh, crap!” It was a Deliverance ship, it had to be. Tye had reported several public solnet nodes were active and in range as he tramped miserably along the filthy riverbed, but he never accessed any of them in case Special Branch’s G8Turings were still hunting him.
He’d just passed a clump of glitzy houseboats sitting on their hulls to the west of the bridge, as useless now as beached whales. They were moored to a floating pier that was the easiest way for him to get up to the path along the south embankment. He took a few steps in that direction, then stopped. What’s the point?
If the shield fell, the Olyix would come, and being on the riverbed or riverbank would make no difference. If the shield held, he was better off down here where the civic sensors weren’t focused.
There were times he hated his ability to map out events.
So he resisted the instinct to get to solid ground and waited passively to see what would happen. Then he realized if the shield fell, the water dammed up outside would come roaring back. “Shit.” He hurried toward the boats, trying to keep his balance on the uneven ground.
Above him, purple blotches burned bright on the shield. They began to spread rapidly, washing away the lackluster amber of refracted morning sunlight. Then strangely came the noise, like high-pitched thunder. Lifting the mirrorshades and squinting against the violet radiance, he thought he could see lightning outside the shield, writhing against the vast, curving surface.
The shield was holding. He paused for a long while, his gaze darting from the horizon up the apex of the solidified air and back again, searching for any signs of collapse, of the lightning stabbing down onto the city’s roofline.
“Fuck you, Jade!” he yelled upward. “We beat you. Do you hear? You lose. Are they letting you see that down in hell?”
Ollie let the mirrorshades drop again, glad to have them now the shield was emitting an extreme violet light. For the first time in too long he smiled as he started walking onward again. He’d just cleared Battersea Bridge when he saw someone up ahead, standing in the middle of Albert Bridge, where the suspension cables were at their lowest. There had been so few people visible along the Thames embankment this morning that he was immediately suspicious. His tarsus lenses zoomed in, which was when it got creepy, because he knew that face. It was one of the blokes from the social agency who were always trying to get Bik’s équipe involved with more mainstream activities. Fuck! Is he here for me?
The man gave him a quick nod and carried on along Albert Bridge.
Ollie let out a nervous breath. Any other day that would have been weird. Today it barely registered. He started forward again.
* * *
—
Eleven o’clock at night saw Ollie standing at the south end of Copeland Road. He was so tired he could barely stay awake. His legs ached from a stiffness that made every step an effort, and he was genuinely worried his ankle injury was much worse than a simple sprain. He’d even started using a pole as a walking stick to take some of the weight off it.
After
he reached Vauxhall Bridge, he’d clambered wearily up the short St. George Wharf Pier and sat down amid the deserted tables of a riverside restaurant. Tye was reporting solnet was active in this area, but with a very low bandwidth. Frankly, he no longer cared.
This section of town had more people on the streets, not that any of them looked like they knew what they were doing there. He took a guess that several of the groups were out hunting for food. The glass doors of the restaurant had already been smashed.
As his overstressed legs recovered, he started munching on his little store of biscuits and told Tye to access solnet once more. A false registration code was the simplest thing in his personal memory cache. Once he was in, he used every trick he knew, as well as everything Gareth had ever taught him, layering up protection proxies to keep security G8Turings from questing his identity. Carefully, he teased out information from public sources, staying clear of the old sites he used to employ as second nature—avoid patterns, anything that could give the G8Turings a lock.
Lichfield Road was officially a raid on a suspected nark gang house. No survivors. An hour after the raid, the metropolitan police had removed the Southwark Legion from their alert-one bulletin. Given the damage to solnet, he doubted even residual characteristic recognition profiles would be in the civic networks.
I’m free!
Paranoia banished that thought fast enough. Canceling the alert-one didn’t mean anything. Jade had been an Olyix agent, so it wouldn’t be the police who were leading any investigation into her associates—a list on which the Legion would be featuring prominently. This was the arena of the security agencies, and they would know who had survived Lichfield Road.
He started to explore the state of solnet around Copeland Road. It was completely dead. Power seemed to be off for the whole area, too. That still didn’t mean it was safe; the spooks could have planted all manner of nonnetwork sensors and spydrones in and around his house—the kind he could never track through a restaurant’s low-bandwidth public solnet node.
No, if he wanted to know what had happened to Gran and Bik, he’d have to go there in person. He could wait, make more plans, scout cautiously over a week, build a digital emissions profile—if spook sensors emitted anything he could print a detector for. Or he could be bold.
The dangerous light shining down off the dome and its accompanying howl decided for him. This wasn’t a time for pussies.
Stupidly, he waited for night, when he could slip into the stealth suit, but there was no night. Not anymore. The Deliverance ships continued their remorseless energy bombardment, which generated the light and noise. This was London now: the unnatural frequency of the glow, the gut-felt noise. It was never going to end.
When he finally acknowledged his mistake it was late afternoon and his ankle was numbed from the new painkiller pac he’d applied, so he set off on the final stage of the trek—a meandering route that took advantage of every interlinked back street and low solnet capacity. Three breaks to rest, because he really was exhausted, not to mention depressed and obsessively fearful.
Copeland Road didn’t look any different—apart from the bizarre color-wash inflicted by the violet shield light. He stared down it for a long time. Nobody was about, none of the windows showed any light—and he knew the neighbors and which houses were in use. Nothing gave that away now. There was nothing visible in the sky either, no drones or birds.
“Fuck it.” He hobbled along to his house. If armor suits came crashing down out of the sky now, he wasn’t going to resist. In fact he’d be happy to tell them everything he knew about Jade and her associates. They were the ones who were responsible for this Armageddon, the end of his life. His anger at Jade and all she’d done burned like a dark star in his head.
The front door was closed but not locked. There was a rough hole where the handle had been. He pushed it open. Knowing what he was likely to find inside didn’t help make it any easier.
They were there in the lounge. He could tell which was which; Bik’s cocoon still had his brother’s wild fuzzy hair around its blank head like a color-inverted halo, while even in this state, Gran’s distorted flesh looked frail somehow.
Ollie sank to his knees between them and sobbed helplessly. Some pitiful part of his mind had clung to the hope that they’d be okay. There they’d be, sitting waiting for him to come back and take them away, holding their hands as he led them along a gilded path to the magical house by the sea.
Someone was coming down the stairs, making no effort to be quiet. Ollie turned around as they came into the lounge.
“It’s you!” Lolo squealed.
They clung together in the semidark, touching each other tenderly to make sure it was real. Ollie’s fingers traced the bruises marring Lolo’s beautiful face. “What happened to you?”
Sie shrugged, but there was fear in hir eyes. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“It was the police, wasn’t it?”
Lolo nodded miserably. “I don’t want to talk about it. They’re animals. I am my own person, therefore I banish them from my mind and refuse to be contaminated by their memory.”
“Why are you here?” Ollie asked.
“Because I knew you’d come back. I can’t live without you. Whatever’s going to happen next, it will happen to both of us. That makes it bearable.”
“You silly, silly thing. You could have gone, couldn’t you? Back to Delta Pavonis.”
“I’m not leaving. I love you, Ollie.”
“And I love you.”
“I’m so sorry; there was nothing I could do for them. I couldn’t stop them changing. But they weren’t in pain, I promise.”
“I know. I’ve seen it happen to other people.”
“Other…What happened to your Legion friends?”
“They’re dead.”
“Oh, Ollie.” Sie hugged him closer. “I hate this universe. How could it have something so horrible as the Olyix in it? What’s going to happen to us?”
“We’re going to live,” Ollie said decisively. “We’re going to get through this. And I’m going to rescue Gran and Bik.”
“Rescue them? How?”
“The Olyix did this with their biotechnology. They can undo it.”
“But…will they do that?”
“Oh, yeah.” He smiled at hir concerned expression. “They will. Because I won’t give her any choice.”
“Who?”
“Nikolaj: Jade’s partner. She’s part of this. She’s a traitor who works for the Olyix, just like Jade did. I’m going to find her. I swear it on the Legion, Lolo. Whatever I have to do, whatever it costs me. I don’t care. She will face me. And that’s the day she’ll know what real vengeance feels like.”
The sedatives the medic team had pumped into Dellian were the maximum a human body could tolerate before the chemicals started to damage the tissue they were intended to soothe. Even so, they weren’t enough. The doctors had him strapped down on the clinic bed. His limbs were flailing about, nails digging into his palms, head shaking from side to side.
Various scanners above the bed moved about in smooth urgency, tracing nerve impulses. His head was almost invisible behind a nest of sensors. Four doctors studied the tabulated results on a hologram projection so wide it covered the whole of one wall. In the center of the ever-changing graphs and figures was a three-dimensional map of Dellian’s brain, turning with the ponderous motion of a planet’s rotation. It should have been completely quiescent. Instead, his neurons were a blaze of activity.
Yirella didn’t need any of the doctors to tell her how bad that was. She stood outside the glass door, her head resting on Xante, his arm around her—providing no comfort whatsoever. Tilliana was on her other side, face blank as she tried to be optimistic despite the sight they faced. The rest of the squad was hanging around in the annex behind her, saying nothing and holding on to cups of
coffee that had gone cold hours ago.
So she remained outside the treatment room, watching numbly. It was easy not to think; if she did she’d start remembering how many squads they’d lost when the arkship blew open the caverns containing the Resolution ships. More than a hundred people gone, snuffed out in an instant. People she knew. Friends she’d grown up with. She couldn’t begin to cope with that much grief, let alone start mourning. Everybody on the Morgan knew the Strike carried a terrible risk. But to lose that many in one action…
Would it all have been different if I’d just let the intruder ship through straightaway? Would they be alive now?
It was a stupid question, she knew. The kind of thing survivors always asked themselves. And for what? So guilt becomes absolution?
So she ignored the guilt and brought all her attention to rest on Dellian. Because that was who really mattered. The dead would forgive her if they knew.
One of the doctors, Alimyne, came out of the treatment chamber. Sie looked weary, almost embarrassed to face the squad as they gathered around. “We don’t understand exactly what it is,” sie said. “Something is keeping his gray matter animated despite the chemical inhibiters.”
“The Neána neurovirus?” Janc asked.
“Motaxan says no. Or at least, not their neurovirus. But these Olyix obviously have techniques the metavayans weren’t aware of. The patterns the onemind fed into Dellian’s brain through his optik were unknown to them.”
“So it is a kind of virus?” Tilliana said.
“I don’t know how else to describe it, so…yes. His optik was forced to project approximately seventeen terabytes into his brain. That is an extraordinary amount of information and memory for the human brain to absorb and incorporate. Maybe too much, given the frenzied state of his brain right now.”
“When it happened, it was like an Olyix talking,” Uret said. “Not Dellian.”
“He was in there,” Yirella said. “He responded to me. He was fighting it. My Del would never surrender.”
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