by Carl Sargent
“Time to visit the old ancestral home. I think. As it happens. Transys Neuronet has a facility of sorts just down the road, but if we head for my northern keep we should be as safe as anywhere else in the country. Besides, ever since I told young Rani about it, she’s been really eager to go. You see, she’s never actually seen a field with a cow in it. Can you believe that?”
30
Cwmbran was a pleasant South Wales town, but they didn’t get much opportunity to see it. The Lear-Cessna dumped the group close to the grounds of the forbidding, moated castle keep, and they’d scurried straight in under cover of darkness.
All the way there, Geraint had apologized for the state of the castle; his father brought Japanese and American contacts here, and they liked their authenticity faked. Even with every regulatory system installed, a real castle keep would have been cold, damp, and uncomfortable. This one had been built barely thirty years ago to be as comfortable as possible, right down to the four-poster beds.
Rani didn’t care what the noble was apologizing about; it was all very real to her. She walked along slowly, wide-eyed, reaching out hesitantly to touch the stone walls. It wasn’t simsense, this was the real thing. She felt so good, she just had to hug Geraint.
“This is banging!” she cried out in unabashed joy.
He smiled broadly and put an arm around her, leading her to the dining hall. On the walls of the long room were Welsh heraldic shields, above the fireplace hung a great stuffed hoar’s head, and the almost endless table was set with silver and crystal and had real wooden chairs. To the ork it seemed like a scene from a fairy tale vid.
Serrin, too, was delighted by it all, “Well. Geraint, you’re a class act. It’s no less than I would have expected.”
Even the worldly and cosmopolitan Francesca was plainly impressed. It was a pleasure for Geraint to dim the lights and light the candles.
“Sorry, folks. Not much in the way of wine tonight.” Geraini apologized later just as a livened servant appeared to serve a silver bowl of mulligatawny. Rani slurped at the peppery soup, pleased at its almost-familiar taste. Suddenly self-conscious she looked up guiltily, wondering if ork table manners were out of place here.
Geraint burst out laughing in his seat at the head of the table, but his face was kind and she knew he wasn’t laughing at her. “God, Rani, it’s really good to eat with someone who really enjoys their food and doesn’t put on any fancy airs and graces. I tell you, it’s a bloody relief. There’s more than we can possibly get through in that bowl, so go to it. Keep room for the trout, though. Pierre does fish to perfection.”
Trout. She had eaten them, of course, but she imagined that Geraint’s would be a far cry from those spawned in the huge depolluting sewage farms clustered around the Smoke. Perhaps these fish would even taste of something. A liveried butler was heaping up real wood in the fireplace, then, setting it alight. Good grief, they were burning wood here?
“Oxide converter in the chimney, ladies and gentleman, so we can actually have a real fire tonight,” Geraint explained. Don’t do that too often. Anyway, as I say, not too much alcohol. We've got work to do after this, and plans to make. It’s all beginning to swim into some sort of focus now.”
* * *
Friday morning saw Geraint walking with Rani across the meadows within the castle grounds. The abundance of nature so entranced her that he wished it were. spring so that she could see, smell, and gather the daffodils, daisies, buttercups, and other flowers that grew hereabouts. It had taken a dozen years of detox before the first of these had blossomed once more in the land.
“The cows had really frightened her at first. She’d seen them on trid, of course, hut in person they seemed so much bigger than expected, and a whole herd of them was quite scary. It had taken a real effort of will for Rani to walk up and actually touch one. At the hesitant touch of her hand, the Jersey mooed pleasingly. The ork jumped back in alarm, but quickly recovered her poise enough to go back and caress the animal as it chewed on the sparse winter grass. That something so simple could bring an expression of such delight to her face touched Geraint. Too long in that penthouse, Master Geraint, he chided himself silently.
As they strolled down to the farmhouse, he talked over the night’s decisions with her. He hoped he wouldn't seem patronizing, but he wanted to be sure she understood everything.
“Well, Rani, we’re up to fifty-six Mary Kellys now, but we can discard seventeen of them, plus the four you checked. It’s too dangerous for us to go back to London, so it was a good move to have private investigation firms doing the spadework. Every hour of today should bring us more information. We can narrow down the candidates without going anywhere near the threat of danger.”
She nodded, “But what about the others you found in my patch?”
“Yes, three more. If you plan to get back to your contacts tonight, well, that gives you Saturday to check them out. This time we’ve got to get to the girl before the murderers do.”
“The police are really no help?” She actually wanted him to say no. If he’d said yes, it would have made everything an anticlimax, brought an end to all this enjoyment. The police had never done much to protect East Enders in her part of the streets of London, but she’d always believed that powerful rich people controlled the forces of law and order with ease.”
Geraint sighed. “Because of what happened to us the night we met you, going to them would be too much of a risk. Despite all my connections we could still end up in jail ourselves. I gave them the best anonymous tip I could, using a special ID code that should alert them that the information comes from a source to be taken seriously-nobleman, politician, or one of their own. But they won’t do anything about it. Not in time, anyway. And they won’t even be able to check out some of the evidence. For one thing, they’ve got nothing on Catherine Eddowes. Without evidence they won’t act purely on the basis of a tip. But at least we’ve tried.”
Walking down the stony path toward the thatched farm buildings, Rani nodded sadly. That was the one murder that had touched her own heart.
“Smith and Jones, those men, we can’t get at them?” She wanted them badly. The way she saw it. they were the ones who had killed her family.
“No way of knowing their whereabouts. They might be acting as fixers right now, and we wouldn’t, couldn’t, know where. Not much we can do about them, curse it. I’ve got my investigators checking them out, but its unlikely we’ll get anything soon. When we do, Rani, you’ll be the first to know. I promise you that.” Geraint knew what it meant to her.
The people behind it all. That company, Transys?” She wasn’t sure, even now, if she remembered the name right.
“Oh yes. We know that they hired Serrin for something pointless, we know they were behind hiring you, we know they hired Francesca. Whether those things are connected, we don’t know. And the problem is that we can’t find out in time. Their computer system won’t let us back in.”
He didn’t bother trying to explain all the details of the midnight run he and Francesca bad attempted late last night; the alerts were constant, the IC impossible to deal with, and the corp had installed an algorithmic node rerouting system that they’d utterly failed to decrypt. They’d gotten out of the system very, very quickly. No more fun and games for a bard and a priestess in Edinburgh now.
“We also think that, for some reason, they’re using brainchipping technology to re-create the Ripper. We’ve got no proof, though. We only know they were once associated with another corp that tried something similar a few years back. We found a file on the subject, but we couldn’t get at the information in it.
“We don’t have much that’s concrete, but it’s still plenty to go on, especially after Francesca was attacked by that Ripper construct in the Matrix. Transys has to be playing around with this. There isn’t any clear link between the Ripper and what Transys has been doing with us, though,” he concluded. That was the sore point for Geraint. He ached to find some connection, some li
nk that would tie it all together, but for the moment nothing presented itself.
“It surprised me that the American knew something about the Squeeze,” Rani said as they reached the bottom of the hill. Geraint knew that disparaging references to “The American” had to mean Francesca; it was as plain as the points of Serrin’s ears that Rani resented the other woman’s beauty and condescending attitude.
“Yes, me too,” Geraini agreed. “But she did some work for British Industrial a while back; you know, the people in Angel Towers?” The corporate arcology adjoining the notorious, strife-torn South London districts known as the Squeeze was an all-too-familiar London landmark. Peter the Panda, the ghastly, fifty-foot-tall purple neon corporate logo, shone far and wide.
“Seems she has a contact in British Industrial she can use. He knows folks in the Squeeze. British Industrial gets their labor there.”
“Don’t I know it.” Rani thought of the busloads of hopeless, underpaid slave laborers, desperate to earn even a subsistence, that the corporation brought in every day. She’d seen their desperate faces behind armored plexiglass. The hell of the Squeeze, its mutated and wretched people, caged in the armored buses, selling themselves for peanuts. She could relate to that.
“You want to see Transys Neuronet?” He was suddenly emboldened. They’re not far away, or at least their weirdest place isn’t. The land belongs to the Earl of Cardiff, but I can easily get permission for a quick sightseeing tour. While Francesca and Serrin deal with the computer downloads, we’ll take a copter and show you something really off the wall. Can’t risk flying directly over their heads, but we’ll get close enough for a good look. What do you say?”
* * *
As they sat down to high tea Geraint continued talking about this and that, but Rani wasn’t really listening. Her head was full of the amazements of Caerleon. Nothing he could have said had prepared her for the sights of the place.
Caerleon, once a Roman town, was more than two thousand years old. The muddy, glistening banks of the River Usk bisected the old from the new town, and from the copter she could see the incredible amphitheater and Roman bullring, with its concentric stone circles ringing the field of battle. Clustered around it were a complex of shiny, flat-roofed buildings, the Transys corporate complex, wrapped up delicately within a web of triple security fences and a whole army of private security.
It was the Knights of Rage that had really amazed her. Resplendent in their black, brown, green, and gold apparel, the dreadlocked blacks stood in knots around the perimeter of the fencing. They raised their crooked staves as one to greet their copter, and the almost simultaneous gesture affected her somehow, bringing tears to her eyes. She had no idea what kept them here, no idea of what this bizarre juxtaposition of high technology and primal instinct meant, at least no conscious idea. Something simpler than that had tugged at her emotions.
Geraint had given her a little time, sensitive to her emotions, before adding, “The dragon… we won’t see him, of course. Virtually no one ever has.”
“A dragon?” Her voice was approaching a squeal. She knew of them only as mythic beasts. She had heard that they existed after the Awakening, hut she had never seen one, and she’d never heard anyone else claim to have had.
Celedyr. One of the three Welsh great dragons. This is the land of the dragon, Rani. It’s our national symbol. it’s on our flag. Celedyr is here, somewhere below the surface of the earth. You know, some people say they can see the ground itself form into waves when it moves.”
“So there’s a dragon, and this corporation, and these Knights of Rage from the Squeeze, altogether? What brings them together?”
“Ah, Rani, if I knew that I’d be a wise man, indeed. The Earl just collects the hefty rent and doesn’t ask awkward questions. That’s all I can tell you.” With that they’d turned around in a gentle arc and flown back to the keep. On the trip back, Rani contemplated all that she had seen and heard, her mind almost approaching information overload.
* * *
Almost as soon as they returned to the castle, Geraint called the group together for a final briefing. “Let’s go over what we’ve got,” he said. “On the Ripper front, we believe there’s going to be a fifth and final murder on Saturday night or Sunday morning, probably in the early hours. It is a horrific assumption, but it follows the logic of all the previous murders.”
“The information we’ve been getting on Mary Kelly is down to fifteen remaining possibles. Between now and the weekend, more data will keep coming in, and we’ll reduce that number further. In the end, we’ll have to contact the likeliest possible candidate and have my security people cover the others. I’ve fed data on the fifteen into the upgraded program Francesca’s written, using all the leads on the original Ripper we could get, from every A to Z in the libraries. We have to keep plugging away on that.”
“And we all agree to put our own personal beefs with Transys on the back burner for the moment.” Serrin put in.
The nobleman nodded, looking around at each one in turn. “That is for one very simple reason. We’ll have time to pursue revenge or justice with Transys later, but we have good reason to think the final Ripper murder may be only thirty-six hours away. That’s the priority for now. Let’s not get distracted.”
Geraint turned at a signal from the console. “Rani, the copter’s here. You have enough money?”
“You bet.” She held the moneybelt tight around her waist.
“Good. If you need more the credstick’s been linked to any branch of Coutts’ to dispense cash at the addresses I’ve listed, and it will only work with your retina scan. We’ll be back in London by ten tomorrow, but it would be great if you could call us here tonight to let us know about your street samurai.” Geraint smiled at her look of eager anticipation. “And Rani. good luck!”
She walked out of the room, down the hall, and out of the keep. She strode across to the waiting helicopter, its blades still whirring. All right, Mohinder, she thought. Let’s see the meat you’ve got for me. This weekend is the real life.
31
Mohinder sat with four of his samurai in the dusty, cobweb-strung upstairs room. Rani was sure that she'd seen a couple of them on the streets before, but she’d never known their names until now.
The one-eyed man with the combat axe and the Bond and Carrington Elite, especially, had an unforgettably familiar face. The way the missing eye had been gouged out wasn’t a pretty sight. He shook with a fine tremor that suggested either brain damage or heavy drug use, but his speech was controlled and coherent enough.
The little Sicilian, Scirea, too; she had certainly seen him scurrying in the shadows. Cybereyes, hand razors, boosted reflexes, sure as hell. He had his bandolier of throwing knives, the bulge of a pistol in his pocket, and body armor, too. With all that she was sure he was probably worth what he was getting paid.
In addition to these two were an immense, bone-headed troll and a muscle-bound dwarf.
After the brief introduction, Mohinder quickly got down to business. “Tell us about the deal,” he said. His granite-faced expression told her not to waste their time and that she would pay for it with her life if it was a double-cross.
“I have friends who are trying to prevent someone being murdered, Saturday night or early Sunday morning. There was a low guffaw from the group.
“Sure do, baby. I thought that’s what we were being paid for, to dust someone.” The dwarf sniggered as he picked at his over-long fingernails with a knife.
“No. We need to stop the murder or catch the assassins. Hopefully both.”
“Sounds easy,” Scirea said. “All we got to do is sit tight and ambush them when they come”
Not as easy as that. We’re still trying to trace the woman who might be the killer’s target. That’s why it’s contingency payment. The basic five hundred hires you to sit tight for the whole weekend. Maybe we won’t find the woman in time. If not, you get good pay for doing nothing more than chewing the fat and p
laying poker for a few days. If we do find the one you need to protect, you get paid extra for that part of the run. Fifteen hundred apiece.”
“Fifteen hundred nuyen? Makes two thousand total?” Scirea was incredulous.
Well, knock me down with a cricket bat, he knows how to add, Rani thought, but kept the scorn off her face. It was true that she was the one calling the shots here, but that didn’t mean she had no need for a certain finesse. ‘My friends are rich people.”
“So why don’t they just hire security?”
“They have. At least, we have that ready if the target is somewhere like the West End. But a team like you is better suited to a job down here. You know this patch as well as I do, far better than any hired security goons. Plus, we got a little extra in the way of weapons and contacts, yeah? Down here you’re the best there is, everyone knows that.”
Scirea was smiling now, a grin that would have been equally at home on the face of a rabid werewolf. The deal made sense and the pay was good. It didn’t sound like a shag job. Besides who’d send an ugly little gopi to try to sucker hardened killers like them?
“Which reminds me, Mohinder,” Rani continued. “That bag you got looks good. You got something for me?”
He showed her the Uzi, the heavy Imperial pistol, the boxes of ammunition. The crossbow and the other bits and pieces didn’t count for a lot compared with the power of the automatic and the heavy pistol. “Eight.”
“What?” Rani lost her cool for a moment; Mohinder was pushing his luck. “Come on. For that price I could get a pair of Uzis and a fresh elf’s head into the bargain.” She knew that the haggling was going to be tough. In front of four of his own, Mohinder wouldn’t want to look bad by giving away too much. To make it worse, two more men arrived just then, one of them even smuggling in a grenade launcher, by the look of it. Rani consoled herself with the thought that even if she ended up having to pay through the nose for the hardware, she couldn’t complain about the meat and muscle here. Mohinder had pulled out all the stops.