by Carl Sargent
“Right. If the baggies catch you, it could be serious. If you fire the thing, you could end up as a guest of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. That is not a prospect you want to take lightly. So, maybe you should leave it behind. I can offer you a large net-gun instead. Non-lethal, constraining, purely self-defense. They catch you with that and you get deported, of course, but then that’s not really a pressing worry right now. You’d only get fined a few thou. What do you say?”
The elf grumbled at first, but he could see the wisdom behind Geraint’s suggestion. he accepted the hefty weapon and was figuring out how to conceal it under his voluminous greatcoat when the laser printer began its smooth flow. Geraint ran over to pore over the printout.
“Five of them. More than I’d expected, given the name. Well, well, one’s just gone on holiday to France, poor woman. Not something any patriotic Brit would do, never mind. Her flight left on Friday, so she’s out. One’s a civil servant, age forty-six. Think we can forget her. Number three’s a cab driver in Westway. Twenty-seven years old. She might be a possible, servicing dubious gentlemen in the back of the cab in Paddington, but right now she’s in the Royal Marsden having a retina-tightening eye operation. Someone could try to murder her there, but they’ve got incredible security. Not very likely, I think.”
“How the hell are you finding all this out?” Serrin muttered.
“Easy. Once I have the names from the public datanet it’s pretty simple to check vehicle licenses, air and rail and coach departure bookings, hospital lists, and the like. But I daren’t risk what I really want to do, which is check through Metropolitan Police files on the Met’s own network.”
“Number four is a troll in the Squeeze. Mind you, the data is five years out of date. Census data down there is pretty patchy even in these days of compulsory poll tax. She’s registered as having been a local counsellor in Croydon in 2044, which makes her one of the radfems. That was a real hoot, that business. Anyway, even if she’s still around I think we can safely eliminate a radical feminist troll from our list of possibles.” Geraint allowed himself a grim smile, which spread into a broader one as he scanned the last entry.
“Bringing us to number five. Who happens to be, good heavens, a retired travel writer living in Wood Green. Hmm. She’s sixty-six and specializes in scripting trid documentaries about vanishing cultures. Oh no, I don’t think so.”
Serrin was puzzled. “But the Catherine Eddowes you know isn’t on the list. I don’t understand.”
“That tells us one of two things. Either she’s moved and isn’t registered at her new address, or she’s where she used to be and census data is incomplete, which is more than likely down in the East End. Over a million and a half Londoners do not appear on any official lists, and that doesn’t even count the Undercity. There are plenty of places where census officials wouldn’t go even if toting a vanload of SAS laser packs at their backs. Most places with a Metropolitan Police security rating of C or worse have very incomplete data. And we’re heading into a C zone or lower, no question.”
“You people sobering up, by the way?”
Francesca ruefully admitted she was getting there, but the evening wasn’t turning out to be exactly what they’d expected. A warm haze of alcoholic glow over coffee and truffles had been an inviting prospect, but that was starting to seem all very distant now. Serrin nodded as he fingered the unused patch in his pocket. He’d let his own body deal with it naturally.
Geraint made one final check on the telecom. “Getting nothing but the answering machine. I’ll leave a short message on auto telling her to barricade herself until we arrive. She won’t take any notice even if she gets it, I suppose, but we have to try.”
Serrin had a final consideration. “Hey, what if the media are onto this? We might end up with a posse of trid-jocks down on the site. They might even get there first.”
“Well, if we do, that's great. We can just turn the car round and go home. But we know something they don’t.”
“What’s that?”
“We know about Annie Chapman. That barely got reported at all; some of her, urn, more discretion-minded, shall we say, clientele wanted it that way. So it would be a fluke if anyone in the media noticed, and as I say, we get a bunch of copycat murders every year. Even if a bright little thing noticed the connection, by this time of night her desk editor will be downing his fifteenth whisky and he’ll just tell her to check it out tomorrow. Murders don’t get any more than a single soundbite in London unless the victim’s a VIP. They’re too common these days.
By the time they had struggled into their armor and packed their weaponry. Geraint needed a minute to stuff a black bag full of bits and pieces: tools, scraps from a survival kit, even a small respirator. He carried it down the hall as the others followed him, and then the grim humor of it became apparent.
“Geraint, that bag. It looks just like-” Francesca shuddered.
“Doesn’t it just? Let’s hope we’re not going to be too late to find a killer toting one just like it.”
It was just eleven-forty when they left the house. Across the city, a very nervous Indian girl found that her hands were shaking as she bent to put on her boots. Soon she had the door locked behind her, had hailed a cab, and paid the troll the fare upfront. She sat in the back of the cab, gazing through the barred windows, the cracks in the plasglass streaming from a central impact location. That told her the windows were bulletproof. It also told her the cab had been shot at, which was pretty standard. Kids just want to have fun, after all.
20
Midnight was closing in on them by the time they parked the Saab in Aldgate. The club wasn’t exactly classy, but the troll bouncer’s eyes lit up when he saw the notes Geraint waved under his snout. He got a nice advance, a promised fee per hour for making sure no one ran off with the car, and the further promise of a handsome bonus if the Saab was safe and undamaged when they got back. Geraint made a showy display of activating the car’s defense systems.
“Look, if anyone does touch it, some pretty unpleasant gas will start billowing all over the place, not to mention the ultrasonics, so make sure no one even gets close, right?”
The troll took the money and gave Geraint a greedy, confident grin. He opened his Italian-designer jacket and displayed a fine range of heavy throwing knives inside. “Don’t worry, boss. Anyone gets too nosy, you got their nose waiting for you when you get back. I’ll rip it right orf of their face. Pay me by the nose?”
Geraint smiled and walked away. “You’ll be paid well, term. See you soon.” I hope, he added to himself.
“We had to park farther away than I would have liked,” he told Francesca and Serrin. “Let’s hope we don’t have to make a run for it. Any closer to Houndsditch, though, and we couldn’t have relied on the car being in one piece when we got back. Tires would have been stolen and we’d probably find the doors beaten in just for the hell of it.”
“Is all that stuff you told Mr. Ugly true?” Francesca asked.
“Does it really matter? I certainly do have some defenses and alarms but unfortunately nerve gas isn’t licensed as one of them. Don’t know what this country’s coming to.”
They edged down the increasingly dark side streets. Some of the street lights had been shot out, but most had been dismantled and their cables and wires stripped for the copper. To their right, one of the very few remaining church clocks began to chime midnight.
“Hell, Geraint, I don’t like this at all.” Serrin’s stomach was protesting his fear. On top of all the food he had eaten, it didn’t feel comfortable at all.
“Okay, stop. Here. It’s the third house along on the left-see? Yeah, the one with the figure on top.”
Against the glimmering sky with its suffused glow of distant neon, they could dimly see the small statue perched atop the roof. Eros, the child archer.
“Serrin, time to do some checking. Top floor, back of the building.”
They’d discussed this move before setting off.
Serrin hadn’t liked the idea of investigating with his astral body; being in a trance in the unlit mean streets of London’s East End was not a particularly comfortable thought. Instead he would simply assense the area first. He was startled by what he found.
“There’s a spell effect in the area. Detection spell. Someone’s running a detection spell.” Reacting swiftly, the elf dropped his astral perception and muttered a few words to activate a spell of his own. Probing for enemies what he sensed within the building confused him.
“Someone in there doesn’t like me much. But I can’t tell if it’s specific. It feels more like a spellcaster is expecting enemies to arrive, but I can’t figure out just how specific it is.” He stopped speaking and concentrated once more; the effect was like watching someone listening to instructions being delivered via a hidden ear-piece. “There’s some masking here, I think. There’s also some kind of-oh, frag it, I can’t tell.”
Switching his spell. Serrin began to search for the presence of a mage close by. He knew there must be one, surely; it couldn’t be just a spell lock, that wouldn’t make much sense. Screwing up his eyes in concentration and probing again, he shook his hands in annoyance.
“Check the woman!” Geraint hissed by his shoulder.
Of course; so absorbed in hunting for the source of the spell he’d detected, the mage had forgotten that part of the original plan. His mind probed for Catherine Eddowes.
“Gol her!… No, she’s gone!” He was furious with himself, wishing he’d learned these mundane spells with more force. He concentrated all his magical energies into the detection, adding resources he’d been withholding for defense in case the target of the detection reacted against him with hostility.
“Bingo!” She was at the back of the building. Then the elf reeled backward as if kicked by a mule. The scream reverberated right through him. He wasn’t going to try that again.
“Geraint, I think-”
His voice trailed away. They looked at each other and readied their weapons, but Stain begged time to prepare some magical defense. There was a mage about, somewhere, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be caught with his pants down.
Geraint stuffed a handful of notes into the hands of the ork pimps lurking by the doorway. Bored and uninterested, they put down their stunprods and ushered the motley trio up the stairs. They’d seen it all before. The runners’ feet hammered up the wooden stairs, and as they reached the top floor, Geraint virtually fell into the tacky wooden door. It bulged in its frame, but it didn’t give way. From within, they heard a loud bang. The door began to splinter as they beat against it, but it so resisted their attempts to force it open that they guessed some heavy furniture must be piled up against it.
The orks came running up the stairs behind them just as Geraint and company managed to force open a wedge between door and frame, pushing laboriously at the wardrobe lodged there. The pimps were yelling. menacing, clearly intending to attack them. Geraint screamed to them that someone was being killed, but Serrin decided it was no time for conversation. Throwing a powerball spell into the orks, the elf almost fell to his knees as the orks reeled back down the stairs. One collapsed unconscious and the other could do little more than hold his head, groaning in system shock. Geraint glanced at the elf furiously as he labored to force the door.
By the time he could drag himself through the wedged door and climb over the wardrobe, the wave of cold night air from the open window told Geraint that Catherine Eddowes’ attacker was gone. He half-stumbled over the barrier and slid to his knees in the slick pool of fresh blood. Gore covered his hands and the sleeves of his jacket, and soaked the legs of his trousers. To get to the window and look out for any fleeing figure he would have had to climb over the bed. It was a prospect he couldn’t stomach.
“Just don’t come in here. You don’t want to see this. Oh, God almighty.” With that, he turned, almost sagged, away from the carnage. Only the neurochemicals kept him from bringing the thousand-nuyen meal up the way it had gone down.
Serrin was still groggy from the drain of the spell; he had really let fly at the orks with all he had. As Geraint reemerged from the room, his face was ashen, but he waved away Francesca’s frantic hands offering him slap patches for the girl inside.
“Forget it. There isn’t an internal organ left where it used to be, We’re too late. We’re too damn late. Let’s get out of here and call the police. That’s all we can do now.”
They descended the stairs, Geraint throwing some more money at the huddled forms of the dazed orks. Ace it, he thought; it wasn’t their fault Serrin had to cream them. They might even have thought they were protecting someone.
When the three stepped out into the street again, they saw something totally unanticipated: a cloaked figure carrying a bag was veering crazily down the road toward a limo parked in the distance.
In the dark they could see no clear details. What puzzled Geraint most was how the man could be in this street if he’d gone out the back. Before he could fire his pistol, however, the first of Francesca’s shots rang out. The cloaked figure disappeared into the opened rear door of the limo as two other figures moved out from the shadows, one with a snarling automatic weapon and the other gesticulating dramatically.
The mage. Serrin realized, almost too late. An invisible tidal wave of concussion slammed into their bodies. The impact sent Geraint flying, Francesca managing to stay upright only by hanging on to the remains of a lamp post, her gun hanging uselessly from a hand that had lost all power of grip. Only Serrin managed to stay in some semblance of shape. His magical defense kept the worst of the manaballs effects away from them. Clutching at the best spell focus he had for combat, he dropped the defense that had saved them and let the combat mage and the street samurai have it with the works.
A huge ball of fire sprang into existence at the end of the road, illuminating the scene with a hellish inferno. Dimly, the lights of the limo could be seen speeding away, but the two figures were still standing there, now become screaming, flailing human torches. Serrin collapsed to the sidewalk.
As the car squealed around the corner and away, the scene fell into an eerie silence for a second or two, a silliness broken only by the crackle of flames licking at the two charred bodies in the distance. Francesca slapped patches desperately onto the elf, whose hand clutched instinctively for the healing spell focus.
Gone. Gave it away. Oh, drek. Serrin couldn’t really focus his vision. Clouds swirled in his head: rocks hung heavy in his stomach.
Geraint fumbled in his bag and readied a subcutaneous as shoots began to ring out from the blackness of the streets. Francesca slapped patches on both herself and the noble while the elf’s body jerked into life at Geraint’s ministrations. From somewhere north of them, a whooping siren began to wail, getting closer by the second.
“Two assaulted orks, one maybe dead,” Geraint said tersely. “I’m covered in blood and you just torched two people. We are not staying around to explain this one to the Metropolitan Police. Come on!” He and Francesca draped Serrin's arms around their shoulders, limping away into a side-alley just as the flashing lights of the police cars appeared in the distance.
Serrin was beginning to feet as if he, too, was on fire. He dropped his arms from around the shoulders of his friends, but he stilt gazed at them with wildly dilated pupils.
“Come on, lets blow these fraggin’ bastards to hell and back,” he croaked as he reeled about. Francesca and Geraint exchanged frantic looks.
“What the hell did you pump him up with?’
“Too late to worry now, its only got a couple of minutes, then he gets the shakes. If he’s lucky. Run, you two, run!”
Speeding haphazardly through the dark back streets, praying they wouldn’t fall headlong over some smashed-out wino or shattered slab of concrete, the three fled into the murderous night.
* * *
Rani was a few minutes early, but even with that he was late. She huddled in the corner of the warehouse,
shrinking into its darkness. At least she knew the exits, should she need them, the huge front doorway through which she had come in and the small barricaded door at the back. That is, it might have been barricaded if the wood weren’t all rotted. Still, it was an emergency exit, just in case. She also guessed that Smeng must have friends lurking about, though she didn’t look for them.
It seemed like an hour or more passed before the other ork suddenly appeared beside her in the cool darkness. He put his arms around her and she gave him the coconut sweet wrapped in rice paper. He smiled tenderly and murmured, “You didn’t have to do that.”
“But I wanted to.”
“Thank you.” He took half of it in one mouthful and chewed happily. “Oh, that’s good. Too good to eat all at once.” He shoved the remainder into a jacket pocket and refastened the zipper. “Rani, you asked my help in getting vengeance. I can only do so much, but what you do get, it wasn’t from me, right?”
“Of course,” Rani breathed. Their voices, held low in whispers, still sounded to her ears as though they were being broadcast throughout the silent warehouse.
All right, this Pershinkin, he has many, many contacts. And a lot of friends, too. He’s not someone who you can pull into a dark doorway and interrogate, right?”
Rani remained silent. She had expected as much.
“But one night, a little someone sees something. Maybe that someone hears something they shouldn’t. Get my drift? Good. That someone overhears Pershinkin acting as a middleman. He is being asked to find some people to make a run to a place called-Longstanton?”
He pronounced it oddly, over-extending the middle syllable. Rani was glad. It meant Smeng wasn’t the one who’d overheard the conversation; this sounded authentically secondhand. Somehow she didn’t want him to have seen or heard anything personally. not to have been involved in this terrible thing, not even inadvertently.
“That where you went?” he asked.