But Todd is beginning to suspect that Antoinette isn’t finished with him. She didn’t go to the considerable trouble of bringing him here only to have him captured by mercenaries, unless that was just what she wanted to happen. Why else would she have had him and Spike locked on the terrace?
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘We are all friends here. Have another drink, gentlemen. Relax. We have a long ride ahead of us.’
‘You don’t indulge, Captain. From your accent I put you somewhere near Boston, and that’s a good drinking town.’
‘Ah. I thought I had lost my accent.’
‘You should lose the tattoo, too. Only American citizens can serve in the Marines.’
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘I know you were in Atlanta, Mr Hart, after the Christers used their nuke. That was a famous atrocity, but there were others. I was in the advance guard that retook Des Moines. We found fifty thousand people dead. Mass suicide. You news reporters were wandering around with handkerchiefs soaked in whisky over your noses and mouths, filming the swollen corpses. I knew then that America was finished. I never regretted leaving when my time was up.’
‘My grandfather emigrated to America at the end of the Second World War, when the communists took power in Albania. He came from a small town, Himara. It’s about a hundred kilometres from here, where my family had considerable influence. By birthright I am Archigôs, the leader of the Council of Elders of Himara. My family always kept alive the hope that we would regain our country. It’s up to me to do it.’
‘You want your own country?’
‘I have my own country,’ Captain Spiromilos says. ‘The communists took it away, and I will take it back.’
‘It’s kind of cool,’ the kid says, ‘Not big. Not much more than a fishing town. But it’s a real once-upon-a-time country. Countries are an outmoded nineteenth century concept, but they can still do things that companies can’t. Put people to death, issue money, set up data havens. Things like that.’
‘So you’re recruiting the Children’s Crusade to help you?’
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘I’m a Christian, and I believe fairies are soulless beasts of the field, don’t let anyone tell you different. The Crusaders have destroyed their souls by embracing the fairy creed. By using them, as you put it, we may in fact redeem them.’
‘I understand you have fairies working for you.’
‘They’re decontaminated. The way the Albanians do it. We run them now, like puppets, from a command computer. Once we’re done, they’ll be discarded. We’re not doing anything more here than the Peace Police are doing in the EU. This is an alien plague we’re dealing with, and I intend to play my part in seeing it’s dealt with.’
The kid says, ‘There’s what the Captain wants, and what we want, and there’s a way we can both get what we want. It’s kind of neat.’
‘We risk our lives,’ Captain Spiromilos says, ‘and they sit here playing with their toys.’
The kid says, ‘No one said life is fair. And Frodo—’
‘Frodo McHale is on his own business.’
It’s interesting to watch Captain Spiromilos suppress his natural inclination to snap the kid’s grubby pencil-thin neck.
He turns to Todd and says, ‘You’ll be the first to report the reestablishment of Himara’s sovereignty, but the rest of your pack in their expense account hotel will be there as soon as your pictures hit the Web. You will thank me for this.’
Todd and Spike get back their clothes, and Spike is given his camera drone. By now it’s growing dark. Floodlights come on in the cactus garden, where a couple of mercenaries move amongst Antoinette’s doll servants, shooting each one in the head. Spike manages to snatch a few seconds’ footage while pretending to examine his drone.
‘No good for fighting,’ Kemmel explains.
Todd wonders what will happen to Glass’s zombie cocktail party, but this isn’t the place to ask delicate questions.
The helicopter takes off, heading north. To pick up a couple of Antoinette’s accomplices, Captain Spiromilos says. In the service area of the complex, fairies are climbing one by one into the back of a truck. They look like blue-skinned, starved children in army drag. They have teeth filed to points—one has actual tusks growing through its upper lip. Most are no more than a metre high. They are armed with short-barrelled plastic rifles with swollen over-and-under magazines, the kind made in Palestine that fire subsonic rubber bullets.
‘Those were fairies once,’ Kemmel explains. ‘No longer. They have been—’ The mercenary makes a chopping motion at his crotch.
Captain Spiromilos leads his men in a brief moment of prayer. The mercenaries bare their heads and bow their necks meekly enough, then scatter to their vehicles. Todd and Spike are put in a jeep driven by a shaven-headed man who grins when he sees their orange coveralls. Kemmel roars past on a motorcycle, to take up a position as outrider. Someone toots on a tinny bugle, and then the convoy moves off, headlights glaring, into the road that runs north along the lake shore and into the forest.
13 – Not a Rescue
Alex wakes with something sharp prodding his belly. It’s near dark. He looks up, expecting to see a fairy, and a familiar voice says, ‘Dear me, Mr Sharkey. You are in a pickle.’
‘Mrs Powell.’
Alex finds he isn’t surprised. Nothing about Mrs Powell can surprise him. She is a locus of improbability.
Mrs Powell smiles. Her hair-do is coming apart, grey strands hanging around her flushed face like Medusa’s locks, but otherwise she looks as if she has been on a light stroll. She emanates a stifling jasmine fragrance. She is carrying her parasol—that was what she woke him with—and now she straps it to the top of her daypack.
‘Mrs Powell, you amaze me. I assume you aren’t captured. Or have you changed sides?’
‘That doesn’t become you, Mr Sharkey. No doubt your temper is not improved by being shut in this cage.’
‘No doubt. I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?’
Mrs Powell says, ‘First Rays of the New Rising Sun knew where you were. And as for transport, we rode here on mules. It took most of the day. I must say I was disappointed. I expected something…’
‘More exotic?’
‘More romantic. We’re close to the border, Mr Sharkey. The Children’s Crusade is almost here. I must say, you do look uncomfortable in there. Shrink-wrapped, as it were.’
‘I’ve been in this cage for some time, Mrs Powell.’
Alex’s gut loosened a few hours ago; although he heaped dirt over the pile of shit, the smell is awful. But he refuses to be embarrassed by his predicament. He has never apologized about his weight, or his life. If he started, he feels he would never stop. Besides, apologize once to Mrs Powell and she’ll never let you forget it.
Mrs Powell fastens the straps of the daypack around her shoulders. The handle of the parasol sticks out on one side of her head.
‘It was a terrible battle, and something of a rout for our side,’ Mrs Powell says, and adds, with dreamy rapture, ‘I wanted to fight. And I would have fought, if I hadn’t been busy tending the wounded.’
‘They’ve worked their glamour on you,’ Alex says. He wonders what she has been infected with. He doesn’t have a database on the clades of fembots manufactured by the feys. No one has, or can. Change proceeds at too fast a pace. Because the feys, like the Children’s Crusade, evolve fembots rather than design them, the outcome is never predictable, and often there are many radically different solutions to one problem.
‘It’s a glorious adventure,’ Mrs Powell says.
‘If you think that, you’re going to get yourself killed.’
‘I only meant that your friends fought so bravely,’ Mrs Powell says.
‘The Angry Ones and the rest of the feys are fighting for their survival against the things which created the Children’s Crusade. Neither side is much concerned about us. They aren’t subtle, or kind, or noble. Those are human attributes.’
‘You should
not have run off, Mr Sharkey. You missed all the fun.’
‘It really would help if you could get me out of here. There’s memory wire lacing under these branches, but if you can find my pack, there’s a torch in one of the side pockets. It’s a ruby laser. Dial down the focus and there’s enough power in the battery for three or four high energy pulses. Enough to cut a way out.’
‘I’m afraid that I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for your pack, Mr Sharkey.’
‘Where’s Kat? She has a torch, too.’
‘I really don’t think she likes me, Mr Sharkey. Even though I bandaged her. Please don’t worry, it was only a flesh wound.’
‘A bite?’
‘No, a little cut from a knife. She isn’t infected, but I did learn some very colourful language. Should I ever find myself in Germany, I can certainly shock the good citizens.’
‘Mrs Powell, I really need to get out of here. You may not have noticed, but we are in the middle of a camp of the enemy. A rescue is not a rescue until you free someone.’
‘They are not here,’ Mrs Powell said. ‘Except for one poor guard. I’m still not reconciled to the killing, you know. A blow to the head would suffice, but—’
‘Get me out!’
Mrs Powell points and says, ‘Don’t be impatient. Help is on the way.’
Alex turns awkwardly, and scrapes the pile of faeces with the heel of one boot. In the last of the daylight, he sees the little figure digging at the stake which tethers the pygmy mammoth. It is Ray. Alex’s heart leaps at the sight. He asks Mrs Powell, Where exactly is Kat?’
‘On the way to a rendezvous. Or that’s what Ray said she was doing. She won’t talk to me at all, no matter what I say. Very rude, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘It’s just her way, Mrs Powell.’
Ray scrambles on to the back of the pygmy mammoth and leans forward to whisper in Hannibal’s ear. The mammoth ambles over, and delicately inserts a curved tusk through the lattice work of the cage. Hannibal jerks his head. The edge of the cage tears free with a ripping noise, showering Alex with dirt.
Ray jumps down and starts trying to pull Alex through the gap, and lights come on all around the perimeter of the clearing. The lights are biolume lamps, held up by more than a hundred fairies. The greenish light of the lamps makes their skins look unnaturally blue. A single ogre towers at the back, three times the height of ordinary fairies, its tusked mouth working. Hannibal steps about uneasily.
‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Powell says.
Alex squints into the greenish glare of the lamps, then looks at Ray.
The fey shows its sharp teeth. ‘Not ours, big man.’
‘I suppose,’ Mrs Powell whispers fiercely, ‘that fighting our way free is out of the question.’
Ray says, ‘Is she crazy?’
‘What do you think, Ray?’
‘I think I should have left you.’
Mrs Powell says, ‘How much trouble are we in, Mr Sharkey?’
‘I wish I knew, Mrs Powell.’
Alex is heartsick to realize that he was used as caged bait. While Katrina’s still free there’s still a faint hope that the Children’s Crusade can be turned, but without the library in his bones and the link to Max it isn’t much of a hope.
Three human figures walk through the circle of light: the Twins and the Web cowboy, Frodo McHale. The fairies part to allow their horned king to follow. His carbon whisker antennae splay out around his head like a spiky corona. A slick of saliva glistens on his chin.
‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Powell says again.
Overhead, somewhere in the night beyond the lights, is the sound of a helicopter coming in to land.
14 – In Another Part of the Forest
The narrow, steep-sided little valley where the fairies ambush Captain Spiromilos’s mercenaries is full of roses. Thousands of white blooms as big as cabbages flower on thorny canes, forming dense drifts between the pine trees on either side of the road. The warm night air is thick with their perfume.
Ever since nightfall there have been flickering lights moving far off in the dark woods, sometimes keeping pace with the convoy for as much as a kilometre. When the mercenaries started to take potshots, Captain Spiromilos passed the word that they should save their ammunition; the lights were no more than a diversionary tactic of the enemy. But suddenly, as the convoy starts the switchback climb out of the rose-filled valley, there is a line of lights on the sinuous ridge ahead.
In the jeep that brings up the rear of the convoy, Todd peers through borrowed night-glasses and sees that the lights are held by very active child-sized figures. All are misshapen in some way. Some are horned, others have spurs on elbows or knees, or tusks, or fan-fold ears. Their actions don’t seem hostile, or even directed at the convoy. In fact, Todd has the distinct and disturbing impression that they are dancing.
Then an explosion lights the night ahead of the convoy. A hail of splinters is punched into the air, rattling through the trees and rose thickets. Tall pines, their bases blown away, thrash and topple across the road. Trucks and jeeps slew to a halt in a flaring necklace of brakelights.
After a moment, the mercenaries’ guns open up, spraying drifts of tracer across the ridge—but the figures are already plunging downslope towards the convoy. Most are cut down in less than five minutes. Heavy gunfire smashes through the rose thickets, scattering white petals like snow. A figure twice the height of a man stands on the ridge, wielding a grenade launcher in one hand and beating its chest with the other. A wireguided mini-missile takes it out in a plume of smoky red fire.
After that there are only individual shots as sharpshooters with infra-red sights and motion detectors finish off the surviving attackers. It’s over in ten minutes, so quickly that Spike is still cursing the driver of the jeep for not letting him use the camera drone. It is so one-sided that it is more of a massacre than a fight. And the horrible thing is that the mercenaries are really buzzed by their easy victory, whooping and shouting, passing around bottles and snap ampoules, and loosing tracer fire into the sky like Fourth of July fireworks until Captain Spiromilos gets on his amplifier and tells them in a voice like the voice of God to quit fucking around and clear the roadblock.
As mercenaries set to work with chainsaws to cut away the fallen trees, Captain Spiromilos walks back along the line of vehicles. Struts would be more like it, Todd thinks. The man even exchanges high-fives with some of his men. When he reaches the end of the convoy he is grinning like a Hallowe’en pumpkin.
‘How did you like the fight, Mr Hart?’
‘It was pretty one-sided. Is that why you didn’t want us to record it?’
‘There’ll be plenty of time to use your camera, but I suggest you don’t try it in combat. Your drone might be mistaken for a weapon of the enemy.’
Spike says, ‘Is that a threat?’
‘Shut up, Spike,’ Todd says. He doesn’t want to antagonize Spiromilos. The man might just take it into his head to shoot them both and make his own arrangements for publicity.
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘It’s a pragmatic warning. We can supply footage if you need it, but defeat of the fairies is a minor part of this.’
Todd says, ‘That’s fine, but the agencies won’t touch footage that isn’t encrypted with a key they can verify. It’s too easy to fake stuff these days.’
Captain Spiromilos ignores this. He takes out a slate and says, ‘Let me show you where we’re going. We did a flyby yesterday, using our own drone.’
Todd looks at the montage of aerial views of a small, ruined town. Marooned amidst dark forests, it is bounded on one side by a wide irregular lake that gleams like ice.
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘We’re about a kilometre away. The Crusade will come through there, at dawn. By then, we’ll have taken the town. It’s an unChristian place full of ware-wolves and worse, but they lack discipline.’
‘With a force like yours, I’m surprised you don’t try exorcism.’
‘In time I w
ill, Mr Hart.’ There’s a sly edge to Captain Spiromilos’s voice. ‘In good time all of this country will get the cleansing it needs.’
‘There’s that word again.’
‘They used to grow good grapes down there, make the grapes into wine and brandy, and drink what they made. It was about all they did, because they lost their lands to the Greeks just before the First World War. Then they started to grow gengineered sunflowers. The sunflower seeds were rich in opium, and supplied half of Europe’s heroin trade. But a rival cartel bombed out the fields in the last civil war, just before the UN established the neutral zone.’
‘It doesn’t look too damaged.’
‘It was bombed with nanotech stuff,’ Captain Spiromilos says. ‘That’s why the land east of it shines. That’s the remains of thousands of hectares of plants. Their cellulose was transformed into a polymer that flooded out across the fields and formed a deep lake before it hardened. The enemy has changed the town since then, but nothing in the way of what you might call defences. We can punch right through. The Crusade will come up the old road, towards the pass, and that’s where we’ll meet them.’
Captain Spiromilos’s Turkish second-in-command, Kemmel, rides his motorbike along the edge of the convoy. His passenger is the pale-eyed Web cowboy. When Kemmel slews the bike to a halt, the cowboy says, ‘Nothing’s moving out there.’
Todd glances at Spike and says, ‘Maybe we could go up on the ridge and shoot some footage of the convoy.’
The cowboy says, ‘There’re more than a hundred semi-autonomous probes out there. If a beetle farts, we’ll record it in stereo.’
Todd explains all over again about the need for encryption.
‘Guy,’ the kid says, ‘that’s nothing more than some kind of fingerprinted bitmapped image deal. We can hack that in no time, put authentic codes in whatever you want. You should lose these no-hopers, Spiro, I can give you anything they can.’
Captain Spiromilos looks at the kid for a long moment, and then says, ‘Maybe the journalist is right.’ He tells Todd, ‘I want you to get all you need. It’s good for me, and it’ll be good for you. We’ll be ready to roll in about twenty minutes. Kemmel, you take them up there in this jeep, make sure they don’t get into any trouble.’
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