‘Innocent people have died out here in their billions,’ Icon countered, ‘their deaths caused or ignored by your government, or both. Our purpose, detective, is to end this and we now have the opportunity to do so. I take it that you do not have the ability to upload?’
Han shook his head.
‘Then you have nothing to lose right now by helping us,’ Icon said, ‘because we are living proof that the government that you work for is not only lying to you but will without doubt abandon you to die as soon as their objectives are fulfilled. Arianna here is the only person who can prevent that from happening. It’s your call, detectives.’
Arianna watched as Han and Myles exchanged glances, and then Han looked across at her.
‘You up for this, Arianna?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Alexei was murdered but he did not see his killers or know precisely why he was targeted. I’m not sure that he could help us even if I do manage to make contact with him before I’m identified.’
‘He will know,’ Icon replied, ‘and if not Alexei Volkov then somebody else. The holosaps cannot be entirely unaware of the conspiracy at hand, and within their ranks it is possible that many know what will happen. I doubt very much that any of them would risk their own immortality or that of their families by becoming a whistleblower. All you have to do is prove the corruption within Re–Volution and we’ll have what we need to bring the government down.’
Arianna glanced nervously at Han. ‘Have you got my back?’
Han nodded without hesitation. ‘All the way. Right now, I just don’t know who it is I’m supposed to be protecting you from.’
‘Everyone,’ Icon answered for Arianna. ‘This is not about Arianna’s survival, or yours or mine. This is about the survival of our species as we know it. There can be no compromise, no doubts, no hesitations. If our plot fails, no human will ever again exist as a biological entity. We will become extinct, detective.’
‘No pressure then,’ Myles uttered.
Icon turned to Arianna. ‘We will travel to the suburbs in the next hour or so. It will not take long. Then you will take your journey into the holosap world.’
Arianna watched as Icon stood up and swept from the tent, leaving her with the haunted feeling that she was about to cross a boundary that no human being was ever meant to traverse.
‘You okay?’ Han asked.
Arianna looked up at him, and the brief notion of replying that she was fine was dashed from her mind by a wave of anxiety.
‘I’m about to die, kind of,’ she replied. ‘So no, I’m not so good. Thanks for asking.’
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Myles replied and jabbed a thumb in the direction of the camp outside. ‘I don’t see any of them leaping up to volunteer for it.’
‘Their donor can’t get close to Alexei, but I can so I don’t have much choice,’ she replied. ‘I might die doing it, but we’ll all die if I don’t.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Han insisted. ‘These guys are up to something, I know it. Icon doesn’t seem the type to just sit out here twiddling his thumbs for twenty five years waiting for somebody like you to come along.’
‘You think they’ve got their own objective?’ Myles asked.
‘Of course they have,’ Han said. ‘They’ve been abandoned to die and then hunted for a quarter of a century. Seeing the holosaps fail to achieve power isn’t going to be enough for them. They’ll want revenge.’
Arianna rubbed her temples, her brain fuzzy with exhaustion.
‘Let’s just stay with what we know for sure,’ she said. ‘St John is the man behind the bill to put the holosaps in power. Let Icon and his people target him if they want to. All I give a damn about right now is getting word of immunity to The Falling out, as soon as possible. Can you do that for me?’
Han stared back at her for a long beat. ‘You want me to do what now?’
‘Get a blood sample from Icon and a couple more from his people and take them with you back into the city. Prove their immunity. Get somebody started on a vaccine.’
‘Just like that, huh?’ Han said.
‘Somebody else must have stumbled across this in the last twenty five years,’ Arianna said. ‘We can’t be the only ones. That means Re–Volution are covering it up every time a cure is found. Maybe they’ve done it before. If you can expose that, it’s another victory for us.’
Han sighed and looked at Myles. ‘You good to go with this?’
‘If Icon’s people don’t kill us first,’ Myles replied. ‘You think they’re up to something and I agree. We’re likely cannon–fodder to help them on their way.’
‘They’re not fakes,’ Arianna pointed out. ‘They’re genuine survivors and that in itself is enough to build upon.’
Myles smiled coldly.
‘And if they’re building towards destruction?’ he challenged. ‘I’d ask yourself this, Arianna: who would you want in control of our government? Holosaps, who for the most part may be entirely innocent of any crime, or Icon’s gang of armed mercenaries?’
***
34
There was no shortage of hardware available to Icon and his people.
The collapse of civilisation in the face of The Falling had been so rapid, and had involved such chaos and panic, that the vast majority of human technology had been left where it stood. Even the military, holed up in London alongside the beleaguered civilians, had been unable to forage far from the safety of the Thames or the north wall.
Icon rode in the passenger seat of an old Army rover, the diesel engine rattling and belching puffs of black smoke as Malcolm, his driver, crunched through the gears to climb a steep hillside road that wound between dense rows of bushes and fields left long untended on its slopes.
The rover breeched the crest of the hill and descended down into another deep valley. Alongside a stream in the base of the valley stood a decrepit farmhouse and two large shelters, built from corrugated iron that was stained a dull red brown. Scattered farm machinery lay where it had been abandoned, an old tractor rusting where it sat at an awkward angle and blocked the narrow track into the farmstead.
Icon waited for Malcolm to negotiate the rough ground alongside the track, where they had long ago cut through the wire fences to bypass the ruined tractor. Here and there, bleached by the sun, Icon could see human bones amid the swaying grasses, lying where they had fallen dead from the blasts of a farmer’s shotgun until he too had finally been overcome.
Icon had found him, half of his head blown off by his own weapon, his body slumped across those of his wife and three children, all of their corpses showing signs of being eaten raw by the desperate and dying who had passed through the lonely valley.
The rover pulled up near the farmstead and Malcolm switched off the engine. The silence was heavy, no sound but for the clinking of the hot engine and their laboured breathing through ruined sinuses.
Malcolm pulled a pistol on instinct, Icon clambering from the rover and slipping a pistol of his own from its holster as they advanced on the storage sheds near the farmhouse. Truth was, there was nothing alive out here any longer, but they had both learned long ago that fortune favoured not the brave, but the cautious.
The steep slopes of the valley and dense woodland at both ends provided good cover and made it difficult for the government’s roving helicopters to land or examine the farmstead in any detail. That, and the fact that Icon had ensured that the abandoned farm machinery and human bones were left where they lay made the location look like any other across the south–east of England: silent and dead. He had also deliberately not repaired the walls or the collapsed doors of the sheds, gambling that an observer would not suspect anything of value hidden within in the absence of suitable protection.
Icon eased his way up to the entrance of the larger shed and peered into the gloomy interior. A pair of large trailers sat on sagging tyres, concealing what lay beyond. The light beamed in shafts from the bright sky outside and dimly illuminated
an angular shape covered in old canvass sacks. Icon moved forward between the trailers and holstered his pistol as he yanked the dustsheets off. Clouds of dust motes swirled through the streaming sunlight, Malcolm keeping watch on the shed entrance as Icon surveyed the equipment before him.
Most of it had been obtained from three locations; the abandoned British Army camps in Aldershot and Pirbright, and an old Royal Air Force base out west called Odiham. Although the military had been organised enough to attempt to bring most of its considerable arms and ammunition with it in the last, desperate flight to London when the country had fallen completely, no number of aircraft, helicopters and vehicles could have shipped everything inside the city’s safe zone.
Icon scanned the crates of SA–80 assault rifles, rocket launchers, grenades and timed charges all laid out in methodical order before him. The weapons were greased and cleaned on a regular basis, the priming charges on explosives carefully packaged separately to preserve their life spans. Much of the equipment had lain here for ten years or more but all of it appeared to have been manufactured yesterday.
‘There’s too much,’ said Malcolm over his shoulder. ‘We’ll never get to use all of it.’
Icon smiled as he replied.
‘You can never, ever have too much ammunition, Malcolm. Countless battles have been fought and lost when bullets have become scarce or weapons poorly maintained.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Firepower isn’t everything but tell me, would you rather have it or be without it?’
Malcolm shrugged but said nothing.
‘I served in the military,’ Icon went on as he lifted an SA–80 from its crate and tested the mechanism. The bolt ran smoothly through its mounts, and he aimed the weapon at the ground and fired the empty chamber with a satisfying click before making the weapon safe again to take the load off the spring before replacing it in the crate. ‘One good shot is always preferably to two bad ones, single fire always more accurate than automatic. But when you’re pinned down in a dustbowl on Afghanistan’s plains with a hundred well–maintained AK–47’s directing grazing fire across your position, you really learn to appreciate the finer points of ten well–lobbed grenades and a rocket launcher or two.’
Malcolm shrugged again.
‘Only if we get the chance to use them,’ he replied, and then lowered his pistol as he looked at Icon. ‘Why are we going through this charade? The woman doesn’t know much about what’s been going on and there’s not much chance that her dead friend does either. Why not just head into the city and hit them hard, now, while we still can? Take our chances with surprise on our side?’
Icon ran his hand down the surface of a rocket launcher, one of eight he had liberated many years before.
‘I would prefer covert exposure of the government’s lies to all–out battle,’ he said. ‘Enough blood has been lost, don’t you think?’
‘The woman has an upload for cryin’ out loud. She’s as much one of them as St Bloody John. There’s no reason for her to risk anything for us.’
Icon sighed and shook his head.
‘Yes, there is,’ he said as he turned to face Malcolm once more. ‘She’s a human being and right now I see more of that in her than any of us. She’s lost a great deal as have we all, but where we talk of vengeance and war she speaks of resolution and our future.’
‘She’s also a psychologist and a priest or something, isn’t she?’ Malcolm asked with a bitter smile. ‘They have a way with words.’
‘You think that I am deceived?’
Malcolm sighed and shook his head. ‘No, only that you’ve placed too much faith in one person.’
‘Any less, Malcolm, than you have placed in me?’
Malcolm stared at Icon and then chuckled.
‘Bastard,’ he uttered under his breath, ‘you’ve got an answer for everything.’
Icon smiled as he dragged the dustsheets back over his secret arsenal before clapping his friend on the shoulder.
‘That’s why I’m still here,’ he said finally. ‘This is our insurance, Malcolm. We will mobilise just as we planned, and if Arianna is unable to obtain the information we need or becomes compromised in her efforts to do so, we proceed as we always intended to.’
Malcolm bit his lip.
‘They’ll be ready by then, if she’s compromised. People go insane you know, when they upload, become part of the holosap cloud–conscience or whatever the hell it’s called. They can talk languages that we can’t understand. She could expose everything we’ve planned.’
‘It will not matter by then,’ Icon said. ‘The best laid plans are always for nothing once battle is joined. It will be our fortitude and courage that will carry us into London and on parliament, living proof that humans can survive beyond the walls and the river, that we are immune to The Falling.’
‘And Arianna?’
‘Is a decoy,’ Icon said, his voice quietening. ‘Her presence will not remain undetected for long. They will see her as the main play against their objective and focus their efforts upon her. They will not see us coming.’
‘Nor will the people,’ Malcolm pointed out. ‘They’ll fear civil war once we cross the bridge and enter the city. The same chaos that brought everyone else down will infect them just as surely as The Falling would and…’
‘If the government doesn’t want to admit their dirty little secret to the people, then we shall have to bring the truth to them,’ Icon insisted. ‘We have not deceived, Malcolm, nor have we harmed. That blood is on the hands of the government. We must expose them for what they are but we cannot choose how it will eventually be done. I hope that Arianna will expose them without bloodshed, but if she fails then we alone must take up the cause. By any means.’
Malcolm nodded. ‘By any means.’
‘Have the men transport our weapons to the rendezvous point,’ Icon said as they walked from the shed. ‘Soon we will have ended this, one way or the other.’
With a firm hand on his friend’s shoulder, Icon guided Malcolm back to the rover.
***
35
New Orleans
A caress of cool air awoke Marcus, a breeze of movement that touched his cheek. He blinked his eyes open, felt an ache in his limbs from where he had lain slumped against the tree trunk warring with a pulsing, influenza–like sickness raging through his veins.
‘Wake up.’
The voice was a whisper as he managed to focus on the face hovering before his.
Kerry smiled down at him, the cool hand of one of her palms gently cupping his cheek.
‘I feel terrible,’ Marcus croaked.
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘It will pass, trust me.’
Marcus could see that behind Kerry the parking lot and the freeway beyond was tiger–striped with shadows and golden sunshine, the sky above a powder blue scattered with streamers of high cirrus cloud. Kerry held a canteen of water to his lips and he drank greedily, the cool water splashing down his chin and neck. She caught the stray droplets and drained them back into the canteen.
Marcus leaned back against the trunk, felt a little of his discomfort easing as the water rehydrated him. Kerry set the empty canteen down and looked at him.
‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said. ‘I thought I was done for.’
Marcus squinted at her. Sunlight was sprinkled in shimmering dapples across her face through the leaves of the tree above and her eyes were clear and green.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, ‘and your fever’s broken.’
‘And yours has definitely begun if you think I’m beautiful,’ she smiled.
Marcus realised that Kerry had been right all along. ‘You’re immune. It worked.’
‘It worked. We’ve got the cure in our blood.’
Marcus closed his eyes and exhaled as though he were releasing a lifetime’s anxiety. He felt himself fold into the tree trunk upon which he slumped. Kerry had been right. Dr Reed had been the enemy and everything that they had worked for now rested on t
heir ability to expose the deception before the machines, or whatever the hell they were, could find and destroy them.
Marcus’s eyes blinked sharply open again. ‘I saw Wasps passing by and…’
Kerry pressed a finger gently to his lips and glanced over her shoulder as he replied. ‘I know.’
Marcus frowned. ‘We can’t have been hard to find,’ he whispered in reply. ‘I had to start a fire to clean water for you. They must have detected it?’
Kerry looked down at him.
‘You did good,’ she said, ‘and the fire was small. Most of the smoke scent would rise straight up in this heat, so it’s not certain that they would have detected it unless a Wasp flew right overhead, and the spheres couldn’t get across the stream to us. Infra–red probably was confused by the midday heat too. I don’t know, but it looks like they passed us by and were headed for the airport.’
Marcus’s tired brain ached. ‘They know what we’re trying to do.’
Kerry nodded. ‘Most likely. Reed knows that we have a potential cure for The Falling, he knows that we can’t travel far and need to broadcast the data soon. The communications hub at the airport is the most logical place to attempt that. As they can’t find us to kill us, they’re pulling back and waiting for us to come in.’
‘Shit,’ Marcus uttered. ‘We’ll never get past those spheres and Wasps.’
‘Or the helicopters,’ Kerry replied. ‘The machines obviously aren’t as perfect for killing as they’re supposed to be, so they’ve brought the troops in. I saw two big helicopters land at the airport about an hour ago.’
Marcus propped himself up a bit further against the trunk, and suddenly a waft of what smelled like chicken hit him. He turned and saw two small rodents roasting on his makeshift stand built from windscreen wipers.
‘Cooking kills the diseases,’ Kerry reminded him, ‘and neither of us can go on without proper food.’
‘They weren’t already dead?’ Marcus asked. ‘Where did you find them?’
After Life (Power Reads Book 2) Page 23