by Adam Roberts
Diana read his expression, and her heart seized sharply in her chest. ‘Eva?’ she asked.
‘Alive,’ he replied, at once. ‘Free and unhurt. But the Tobruk Plasmaser Elevator has been sabotaged.’
Diana went straight to her bId, and caught the data as Iago sent it to her. She saw the twin towers structure of the Tobruk Plasmaser housing; and the yellow desert, and the blue sky. The technology was simple enough: the descent of the down-car, buoyed on a semi-aligned column of plasma, forced the material down into one side of the large Ц-shaped structure of the main housing. The plasma was manipulated there via a fusion-level containment field, and fed out up through the other funnel to lift the up-car. As a fully laden car brought passengers or cargo down from orbit on one side, another car was pushed up by the counterforce on the other. It was so efficient a system that only a very little extra energy needed to be generated at ground level to boost the upward plasma column sufficiently to lift any Elevator car clean into orbit. But the pressure and heat inside the main housing was very high, which meant that the structures were particularly vulnerable to attack, and very difficult to repair once breached.
Diana’s bId showed her the damage. There was an irregular oval hole in the flank of the main housing, with blackened flower-petal sections bent outward – a great poll of vitrified sand. Craft buzzed through the air. Figures were visible on the ground.
‘Eva is still grounded?’
‘Yes, Miss,’ said Iago. He waved Berthezene over towards them. ‘I’m afraid this may well be war, after all. It’s a foolish play, by whichever Clan is responsible, and in the longer run I am confident it will work in our favour. But for now we must get you away from the island. The initial twelve-hour window was much too optimistic. They could strike here at any moment. If it is war, then all bets are off.’
Diana got to her feet, feeling a little dazed (although maybe that was because the blood fled from her head to her legs as she stood). The handservant, Sapho, was blinking and looking around her.
‘I have notified a policeperson to reclaim Miss Sapho,’ said Iago, as Berthezene arrived, breathing heavily.
‘What’s going to happen to me, Miss?’ Sapho asked, in a strained voice.
‘For now,’ Iago answered her, ‘nothing. Your confession here is a private matter. The police will return you to custody. At the moment larger matters are ongoing. When things have settled your fate will be decided.’
‘Is there really going to be a war?’ Diana asked.
‘War will be brisk,’ said Iago, confidently. ‘Clan Yu have overreached themselves badly here. I’m surprised, actually, at their strategy. If we can keep you two alive, I can’t see any way for them to win. But we can worry about that later. The most important thing right now is to get you to safety.’
‘We need to—’ Berthezene began to say. But Iago stopped him, raising one hand. He pointed, and they all looked. Dominico Deño was coming towards them; and he was not alone.
‘Things are either considerably better or much worse than I thought,’ said Iago.
Walking across the grass, with a characteristically unfathomable expression on her face, was Ms Joad.
11
Ms Joad Again
‘Good evening, my dear girl,’ said Ms Joad. ‘And look at us! All standing about on the ground in the open air, as if gravity were nothing to us! All except this scrap of a thing – who are you, dear?’
‘This is one of my handservants,’ said Dia, looking from Berthezene to Iago.
‘Slouching in a chair?’ tutted Ms Joad. ‘You treat your servants with more latitude than I do mine. You stay here,’ she told Sapho. ‘Your mistress and I are going inside the house to have a chat.’ She started off towards the main entrance.
Stalking after her on her crawlipers, Dia caught up with her. ‘What are you doing here, Ms Joad? Not that it isn’t lovely to see you, but your timing is unlucky. There are rumours of war – the plasmaser elevator at Tobruk has just been . . .’
‘I know, my dear,’ said Ms Joad, offhand. ‘I know all about that. Come inside and we’ll chat about it. I’m really most excited to hear your version of events.’
Dia glanced back. Berthezene, Deño and Iago were coming with her; and Sapho, still sitting in the chair by the table, a plate of fruit pieces beside her, sat. ‘Should we just . . . leave her there?’
‘A policeperson is on his way for her,’ said Iago. ‘She’s not going anywhere. The appearance of Ms Joad is a much more important matter.’ He looked worn.
‘It is, isn’t it, though?’ said Ms Joad. ‘Come inside – after you, my dear.’
Diana stepped through the main door. In her mind, she ran through the possible reasons the Ulanovs might have to send their sinister deputy down to Korkura not once, but twice in as many days. Would it benefit them to sabotage one of the Argent’s plasmaser elevators? Surely not! Presumably that attack had nothing to do with the Ulanovs.
Iago followed. And behind him came Ms Joad. As had happened the last time she had visited, the main door squealed and shook as she stepped through it. Berthezene was right behind her – the alarm sounded at his weapon too, of course, but he had the gun out and began clearing it as an accredited weapon with the House AI. The alarm continued sounding.
‘My weapon,’ said Ms Joad, with exactly the same tone of fictional surprise she had used the last time.
Deño came through, and the door complained yet again. He brought out his own gun for the House AI to check. Berthezene had the smartcloth pouch in his hand. ‘Your gun, Ms Joad?’ he said.
‘Must I?’ she drawled, bringing the plasmetal pistol into view from beneath her shift.
‘I’m afraid so, ma’am,’ said Berthezene, holding the pouch towards her.
‘You don’t have to undergo this demeaning procedure, Mr Iago,’ Joad observed. ‘Because you are unarmed. Isn’t it odd for a bodyguard to go about unarmed?’
‘I’m no bodyguard, Ma’am’ said Iago.
‘No, that’s right, isn’t it. You’re the Tutor. I might ask what you tute, as it were. But I’m not sure you even know yourself. No,’ she said, regarding the proffered smartcloth bag. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s mandatory, I’m afraid, Miss’ said Berthezene.
‘Really? Well if I must . . .’ She held the gun out, and with a quick flick of her wrist discharged it. The report was no louder than a pair of hands clapping together, but the effect on Berthezene was dramatic.
The round went into his right cheek, snik, and it left a little black-red dent there. At the same time it came out of the back-left of his skull with a louder thunk, and the rainfall sound of many droplets spattering against the wall behind. A conic spray of red and grey sprouted from the back of his head, a brief ponytail of matter. He jumped backwards. His eyes were full of surprise. Conceivably they were full of pain, for pain is a surprising thing. But, really, he looked more astonished than anything else. His jaw swung open, but no sound emerged. A half-instant later he banged hard against the wall behind him, and the spectral red ponytail was gone, and his arms flew out, and he slid down to the ground.
Diana shrieked in astonishment and alarm.
Iago took one step forward and stopped. Deño’s weapon was aimed directly at him. Aimed, Dia saw straight away, at him and not at Miss Joad at all. Deño! Her mind was skilled at putting pieces together, quickly and under pressure, but even an idiot could have seen this bigger picture. The attack was not coming from either the Clan Aparaceido or the Clan Yu. Diana’s secret love-message to Anna had not betrayed their location (and even in the middle of these terrible new developments she felt a twinge of relief at this). Things were much worse. It was the Ulanovs themselves. The Ulanovs themselves were moving against Clan Argent. Diana thought, rapidly: were her MOHmies safe? Were they seizing Eva right now? Was it all over?
Her mind was doing that human-weakness thing: repeating there must be some mistake over and over.
Ms Joad peered at the corpse
of Berthezene, propped slovenly in at the coign of floor and wall. Red was tracking down the wall in tendrils. Then she spoke: ‘he’s unarmed.’ She meant: Iago. Then she spoke again: ‘take him down – don’t kill him, though. I’ll want to talk to him later.’
Iago, began to speak: ‘Dominico, wait—’. But Deño fired, shooting him in the right foot. He hit him square in the middle of the foot, the round blasting it to shreds. Iago danced cumbrously, rotated through a quarter-turn, and fell. He hit the floor with a louder clatter than Berthezene had done, clutching his wounded leg, his face white as ash. But he didn’t cry out. His lips were tight. His breathing was suddenly loud as cicadas.
He was down.
And now Deño’s gun was aimed at Diana’s chest. She couldn’t help herself; her heart started beating like a pulsar, hard and quick, and the adrenaline prickled through her skin and made her scalp fidget and buzz.
‘You’re not ours,’ Dia said, to Deño. ‘You belong to the Ulanovs.’
‘My dear girl,’ said Ms Joad, removing her gaze from Berthezene’s body and stepping over to stand in front of her. ‘Don’t we all? And of course we have people everywhere. You’d expect nothing less.’
‘Are you arresting me?’ Diana asked.
‘The legal route?’ said Ms Joad, smiling broadly. ‘Gracious.’ She tucked her firearm away and folded her hands together in front of her. ‘The stakes are very high, my dear; and sometimes events move too fast for all that . . . rigmarole. We had forces waiting for your sister at Tobruk, but your people blew the main building and so got away. But – really. Where are they going to go?’ She shook her head. ‘We will have her very soon. And although your parents have made you so as to be resistant to the various truth pharmakons and interrogations drugs, we can always fall back on older-fashioned modes of questioning. Can’t we? I think that if I torture your MOHsister to death in front of you, you will tell me what I want to know.’
In Dia’s head: I can’t believe this is happening! This can’t be happening!
Dia’s heart thrummed faster still. She knew that Ms Joad was capable of this; and she knew she would not be able to bear it. ‘There’s no need for that,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from burbling with fear. ‘I’ll answer any questions I can. I’ll do it now if you like.’
‘Excellent!’ Ms Joad held up one finger. ‘No jousting, though.’
‘Jousting?’
‘Game playing. None of that! Your brain is a thing of wonder, certainly, and could be very useful to us. But the rest of your body is nothing more than a machine for generating agony for you, and I am happy to activate that machine. Oh! Oh, if you try to play games with me, I’ll demonstrate what I mean.’
Despite her fear, Diana’s heart was returning to a normal rhythm as the initial flush of adrenaline diluted in her bloodstream. Her legs ached. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘May I sit down? This gravity is oppressive.’
‘You may not,’ said Ms Joad, with a wicked smile. ‘Here’s my first question: where is it?’
The blood in Diana’s ears was thrumming. ‘That is a rather general question,’ she said.
‘Deño, aim your weapon at Miss Diana’s knee, if you will be so kind.’ Deño obliged, swivelling his aim downward. ‘I shall ask you again, my dear, and you will either answer me, or my-man Dominico will discharge a round into your knee. It will be extraordinarily painful I assure you! – ask your butler, there, Mr Iago, sprawled on the floor! And we only shot him in the foot! A knee is much worse. Still, you will need to be stronger than your pain, because I will ask one further time. And if you do not answer me, I shall have Deño turn you over to shoot you in the back of the knee. The first shot, entering the patella directly, will drill a hole in the bone and kick out some flesh behind. This is very painful, but the patella would be salvageable. The second, though, would blow your kneecap to shards and spit them bloody all across the floor. You’ll lose the leg. Do you believe I would do this to you?’
‘Absolutely I believe it,’ said Diana.
‘Very well. Where is it?’
The strange part of all this was that Diana was beginning to feel sleepy. It wasn’t that she was fearless: on the contrary, the fear was an acute, throbbing pressure in her chest. She was breathing shallowly, her forehead tickling with sweat. But nonetheless, the urge simply to go to sleep possessed her. Bad idea, she told herself. Berthezene’s body was right there, as if she needed further proof that Ms Joad was murderously genuine. Iago’s body, wounded but still alive, was somewhere – she couldn’t see him, he must be behind her. To fall asleep would only enrage Joad. The sleep would be short-lived. And yet the urge was there.
For Diana, of course, sleeping was something she associated particularly with problem solving. And perhaps there was nothing more to it than that: presented, as she was, with an acute problem – answer Joad’s question or be mutilated and crippled! – her mind was trying to retreat into its habitual problem-solving mode. It would not do her any good, of course. She had no idea what the question was asking, let alone what the answer might be. Where is what? Keep awake, she told herself. To stave off the sleep she pictured to herself the projectile leaving the end of Deño’s gun, and speeding rapidly as a photon to her leg. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the circular sun-face of her knee cap shatter under the force of the blow. She visualised it exploding out in every direction in a blast of super-new light. She thought of the acronym.
‘FTL,’ she said, with a wobbly voice.
‘Exactly,’ said Ms Joad. ‘But where is it?’
There were several things she could do; but none of them were going to be any use. Saying she didn’t know – though it was the truth – would cost her a kneecap. Inventing an answer might spare her, at least temporarily, but then she would be required to name a plausible hiding place, and she had no idea what that might be. How could FTL be in any one place, anyway? Was Joad asking for a working interstellar spaceship, parked in the asteroid belt? Or a set of equations and technical specifications on a datachip? Would an answer of the ‘inside the head of the such-and-such a person’ type satisfy her? Diana couldn’t think of any likely-sounding lie along those lines. So she opened her mouth to speak with her mind completely blank, and when the words came out they surprised her as much as anyone. In the corner of her eye she saw the upward motion of an object. But she wasn’t looking there. She was staring right into Joad’s eyes. And she said: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion, Ms Joad, that I don’t like you very much.’
She braced herself. Or tried to. How does one brace oneself, anyway?
Hell.
There was a slapping sound, and the gun discharged. Deño’s aim delivered the round into the floor with a resonant thud. Diana realised, a beat later: somebody had slapped Deño’s arm down, just before he fired.
Then everything happened very quickly, a staccato succession of actions. First Deño’s head clicking back, his chin pointing at the ceiling, and a vivid splurt of red; then Deño’s whole torso spinning on its right foot, rotating about and then backing towards Ms Joad. Ms Joad was expressionless; but she was reaching into her holster for her weapon. Deño’s was glaring at the ceiling, red gushing down his front. His lurching body collided with Ms Joad. She staggered, went onto her back foot, and Iago was there – right in front of her. Diana couldn’t see how he had got there. He seemed to appear from nowhere, standing upright. He punched forward, aiming his fist at Joad’s sternum. His fist went in, and when it came back blood was gurgling from Ms Joad’s chest.
For the first time, Ms Joad’s expression betrayed something less than self-assurance. She looked incommoded and angry. Her eyes were on Diana’s. ‘I shall see you,’ she said, ‘again.’ But on ‘again’ blood bubbled from her mouth, and the word was half drowned, and she fell to the left and hit the floor with a crash.
Diana breathed in, and then out.
Her heart was galloping.
She breathed in again. Out again.
She looked down at
the floor. Three human beings, sprawled over the white stone. A patch of oily-looking red liquid was expanding across the flags. The borderline of this growing area came close to her shoes, and she stepped backward to avoid getting them dirty.
Diana looked up. Iago was standing there. The lack of a right foot was a surreal sight: the leg ended in a flange just below the ankle. But there was no blood.
‘Iago, you do not have a gun,’ she said.
‘Indeed not, Miss Diana,’ he said, stepping over the legs of Deño’s supine form and taking her hand. His stride was rendered uneven by the lack of the foot, but he seemed to be able to put his weight squarely on the bottom of the severed stump without discomfort.
‘The door would have registered it if you had had a weapon,’ Diana repeated, a little stupidly. Then she said: ‘you are lucky the bullet missed all the blood vessels in your foot.’ But as she said it, she realised it was a foolish thing to say – she saw that it did not in the least explain the state of affairs.
‘We must leave at once,’ Iago said, his voice perfectly level.
A fuller understanding of what had happened was just dawning upon Diana. ‘What did you do?’ she cried out. ‘You killed Deño! My goddess, you actually killed him!’
‘Would you rather him shoot you in the leg?’
‘Leg,’ she said, staring again, with a new kindling sense of horror, at the absence at the end of Iago’s leg. ‘Leg! Leg!’
‘As you can see, my legs are artificial, Miss Diana,’ Iago said. ‘Both of them. Having a chunk knocked off the end of one is inconvenient, but the machinery still seems to work.’ And Diana’s problem-solving mind went: so that was how he was able to stand around so insouciantly in this crushing gravity.
It hardly mattered now.
She gulped, gulped again. ‘Goddess. Oh, oh, Iago,’ said Diana, taking another deep breath, and looking at the bodies. ‘You struck them down. How did you strike them both down?’
But she could see the answer to this question. In his spare hand he was holding a knife.