by Chris Ward
The other guy shifted nervously from foot to foot, his eyes darting everywhere. While Saul looked comfortable in the Tank, the newcomer looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.
‘Tell Pete what you told me,’ Lindon said.
Saul Grey stepped forward. ‘Took a new fighter, guy named Mickey, for a bit of fun with this one here’s piece. We paid like, all legit. Two guys jumped us. Mickey got knifed.’ He pointed to a gash on his cheek. ‘One guy hit me with a piece of wood. Had metal sticking out of it. Rectangular, not some usual club. That sound familiar to you?’
‘Lindon?’
‘Could be one of the Tube Rider catching boards.’
‘Mickey would have made me a lot of money,’ Saul said. ‘I want those guys dead.’
Pete leaned forward. ‘When was this?’
‘Sunday night. St Cannerwells, in the old station on the Piccadilly Line.’
‘What did these guys look like?’
‘The guy that hit me was kind of young, longish hair, a pretty-boy face that needed a beating. The other was taller, short hair … fuck, I don’t remember. I wasn’t concentrating on them, you know.’
Lindon started as Tim Cold stood up from a sofa in the far corner that was turned towards the wall. Tim had been so quiet, so still, Lindon hadn’t noticed him. Tim tossed an old newspaper aside and turned to face them.
‘This … “piece” you mentioned … what happened to her?’
The scrawny man turned to face him. ‘My sister? We left her behind. They probably fucking—’
‘Your sister?’
‘Yeah, I mean—’
‘How old is she?’
‘Uh, she’s—’
‘Do not lie to me.’
Lindon felt his heart beginning to race as Tim Cold came towards the group. His eyes were as grey as iron, his mouth set hard.
‘She’s six … fifteen.’ The scrawny man shook like a loose wooden pole caught in a storm. ‘Nearly. Nearly fifteen.’
‘Fuck you, man. You said she was eighteen,’ Saul Grey said.
‘You sell your sister?’ Tim Cold said. ‘It is people like you that brought about the fall of our once great country, and will ensure its eventual demise.’
‘When our parents died we needed the money. We agreed—’
‘”We”. A beautiful, so often misused word. What’s your name?’
‘Sebast … ian.’
The scrawny man gasped. He dropped his gaze to a knife protruding from his stomach. Tim Cold let go of the handle. He took hold of one of Sebastian’s hands and closed the fingers around it.
‘Hold it in. If you try to withdraw it you’ll bleed out in six minutes, and this room will stink of your blood for days.’
Sebastian stared at him. ‘We … had … no … choice,’ he croaked.
Tim Cold shook his head. ‘There is always a choice,’ he said, pushing Sebastian away. The scrawny man stumbled and collapsed in a corner of the office, still holding the knife.
‘Lindon, ensure this man is compensated,’ Rusty Pete said. ‘This is information that can help us.’ To Saul Grey he said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
Saul Grey shrugged. ‘There are always other fighters.’
On Pete’s instructions, Lindon took Saul down to the Tank treasury, a room filled with pilfered loot, everything from jewelry to mobile phones, PC hard disks, computer games, even musical instruments. Two men stood guard outside. Neither was allowed inside without the other present.
‘Two minutes,’ Lindon said to Saul Grey, indicating the door. ‘Whatever you can carry in your hands. Anything you drop belongs to us.’
As Grey gave an understanding nod and went inside, Lindon asked the guards to keep time, then returned to Rusty Pete’s office. As he arrived, two more guards were dragging Sebastian away, the man now pale-faced, his shirtfront soaked with blood. His eyes were searching from side to side and his mouth was moving silently. It was likely that he would die, but Tank justice was a funny thing. Death was final. Prisoners were often more useful alive.
Inside the room, Tim Cold was sitting on the sofa, Rusty Pete in a swivel chair. Lindon stood by the door until asked to sit down.
‘Lindon, where do your crew hang out?’ Tim said.
‘Charing Cross East. Although there are few of us left.’
‘How many other abandoned stations are there across London?’
Lindon shrugged. ‘More than twenty. I’m not sure. I can get Spacewell to find out.’
Tim nodded. ‘Put out the word that all abandoned Underground stations across London are now off-limits. To everyone. Anyone caught in one will be brought to the Tank for justice.’
‘Will people listen?’
Pete stood up, swaggered a few feet across the room, then turned and kicked over his chair. Lindon smelled alcohol on his breath.
‘They’ll learn to listen once they see corpses hanging from the gallows on Westminster Bridge. Tank justice, Lindon. That mean anything to you?’
Lindon knew the rote answer. ‘It means everything.’
‘Good. Spread the word among your people.’
Rusty Pete waved a hand at him and Lindon took the hint. He headed for the door. Outside in the corridor, he heard the door behind him open. He turned to see Tim Cold hurrying to catch up.
‘Got time for a private word, Lindon?’
‘I thought we just had one.’
Tim put an arm around Lindon’s shoulders and guided him through a door into a quiet waiting room. Like most rooms in the former palace, it showed signs of looting and abandonment, the broken windows boarded over, cracks and dents on the wooden benches, tears in the seats. Even the walls had rectangular marks where paintings had been removed.
‘I need you to help me,’ Tim said.
‘In any way I can, you know that.’
‘I’m worried Pete is losing control. This business with the government, their encroachment here … it’s put the wind up him. He’s drinking too much, dishing out too much cruelty.’ Tim waved a hand around him. ‘Here we try to maintain our civility in a way that London has failed to do. Pete is concerned for the future of the Tank, but his very actions risk undermining it.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
Tim Cold grinned. ‘I want you to catch me some Tube Riders. And if you can’t find any, I want you to catch me some anyway.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘We need a scapegoat. Someone whose death will satisfy … what did Spacewell call her? The Siamese Queen.’
‘Dreggo.’ Lindon spat on to the floor, unable to help himself.
‘She used to lead your gang.’
‘She quit. The next time I saw her was when she showed up here flanked by the Personal Guardsmen. I’m not going to begin to guess what happened, but back when she ran with the Cross Jumpers there was something bad about her. And I don’t mean in general London bad, I mean really bad.’
‘What?’
‘She was reckless. She didn’t care about anything or anyone. She ruled with violence, but she was dangerous, deadly even. She would kill men who opposed her openly, in plain sight of the others. People stopped coming back.’
Something made him stop short of revealing the rest of what he knew about Dreggo, as if it gave him an advantage. He had never forgotten the night after they had finished jumping that Dreggo had taken him back to a dank little room where she was squatting for a very different kind of thrill.
After she had got what she wanted, he had opened his eyes to find a knife pressed against his throat, the arms holding him down stronger than those of any man. It hadn’t been natural strength, but something modified, something inside her body that she could control. He had expected to die, but Dreggo, instead, had demanded only his loyalty.
‘Could you get close to her again? I need to know about her. If I can understand what power she has I can learn how to manipulate her.’
Lindon shrugged. ‘I don’t know. If I had information, maybe. Somethi
ng that would make her trust me.’
‘Then we need to see to it that you have exactly that.’
Tim gave him a single pat on the shoulder, a jovial little threat. Failure was unacceptable.
‘I can read people, Lindon. Her only objective is to see the Tube Riders dead. Why?’
‘She was jealous of their group. She wanted to attack them. I wasn’t there on the day of the attack, but her friend got killed.’
‘And she disappeared?’
‘She quit the group when we wouldn’t follow her in a turf war. I don’t know what happened to her after that. There were rumours of her death, others that she’d been taken by the government.’
‘And now here she is. You know how valuable it would be to have her on side, don’t you?’
Lindon nodded. ‘It could mean the survival of the Tank.’
Tim Cold patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a wise man, Lindon. I trust that you’ll find a way to do as I ask.’
Lindon wasn’t so sure, but what choice did he have? He nodded. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Good. Come and see me again in a few days to update me on your progress.’
Lindon watched Tim Cold walk away, imagining the handle of a knife protruding from his back.
He had survived getting close to Dreggo once. He wasn’t sure he could do so again, but if it was inside information on the government that was needed, there were other ways.
‘One day,’ he whispered, remembering the knife again.
12
Request
The Huntsman lay strapped down on the metal gurney while the surgeons and scientists buzzed around it in a never-ending cloud. Mika sighed as she watched on the video screen, wondering if they would lose this one too. The battered remains of three Huntsmen were all that had returned from Cornwall, and two had already expired, their systems ruined by a mixture of impact damage and seawater infiltration. One had been reactivated despite its human brain being starved of oxygen for several hours, but it had been limp and unresponsive, of no more use than one of the remote-controlled robots that were soon to be brought back into service by the government in a desperate attempt to boost its military presence.
The total number of mission-ready Huntsmen was down below thirty. The Governor had ordered more, but their development took months, sometimes years. They couldn’t be built on a production line like robots could; each Huntsman was handcrafted like a piece of macabre art. While each one might be built to certain specifications, they remained individual, unique.
Mika got up and headed down to the research labs in the lower basements. As always, it was difficult to be sure whether it was day or night, because so few of the clocks at the end of each corridor worked, but her watch said it was nearly midnight. The labs never really shut down, but most of the secretive work happened at night when there were fewer people around.
She found a young man with unruly hair sitting at a computer terminal. In front of him in a room on the other side of a one-way mirror, a Huntsman was prowling back and forth, its hood pulled up over its head.
‘Rick, how’s he doing?’ she asked.
The young man looked up. ‘Dandy,’ he said. ‘A few spikes on the heart rate. The family photos are quite the trigger.’
The remains of several large boxing punch-bags lay scattered around the room, their hides ripped open, the contents spilled out.
‘Did he recognise anyone?’
‘He said his wife’s name.’
Mika nodded. ‘Then he has to go under again. Memories are unacceptable.’
Rick shrugged. ‘You read the report on Lyen, I take it? Memories seep back in. Nothing we can do about that. He clearly recognised his sister.’
‘Wipe his memory.’
‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t it be better to work on better electronics controls? Wiping his memory could render him useless.’
Mika stared out at the newest Huntsman, only awakened from surgery this morning. Several months of tests lay ahead before he could be considered ready for active service, but it was a start. Recognising family members, however, was a no-go.
‘Wipe his memory. That’s an order.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Rick raised a hand in a salute. ‘But you owe me a date. Pinkie promise?’
It was a regular invitation that had gone on for months since the kid had been transferred from another facility. Rick was at least five years younger than her but he had a colour about his personality that few government workers shared. Mika couldn’t help but smile. ‘Okay, I give up.’ She sighed. ‘But this weekend I’m too busy.’
Rick shrugged. ‘Ah, what, no burnt-out restaurant or cinema full of homeless? What else are you going to do? I thought we could pull our chairs close to each other and play poker for matchsticks.’
She ignored the sarcasm in his tone and grinned. ‘Sounds perfect. Just be aware that I cheat.’
‘I’d expect nothing less.’
She left Rick at his terminal and headed back up to her office. As always, her phone was flashing with a dozen messages from other departments. She cycled through the messages—the usual mixture of demands for reports, excuses for not finishing them, apologies for equipment failures, and requests for funding. She frowned or sighed at them all, mentally making a note of which junior member of her team she could pass them to and be sure they would get done.
The last message was from Dreggo.
It was hard for Mika to accept that a former experiment gone wrong was now her superior. She had seen Dreggo’s old case file before it disappeared. The girl had been part of a new program of Huntsman development, models designed for stealth and infiltration rather than for tracking and combat. First generation Huntsmen were monstrous things, the remains of the human hidden behind a dog’s snout, their bodies covered with fur, hands and feet partially hooked like claws. Dreggo’s strain had received enhancement to their physical abilities and sense of smell, but their retained human form meant they could pass among the general populace unnoticed.
Dreggo was the prototype, but had escaped before her development was complete. Later recaptured after being mauled by a damaged Huntsman, she had been repaired and sent after the Tube Riders, rather ironically as leader of a troop of Huntsmen charged with tracking them. Believed lost during the battle in the Southwest Exclusion Zone, she had resurfaced several months later, under the charge of the Governor himself.
Dreggo’s voice chilled Mika’s bones. Her vocal chords had been damaged and later repaired in the lab, and now her voice sounded like rocks scraping together, a sinister metallic hiss.
‘I need a further search of all suspected Tube Rider territories.’
What followed was a list of abandoned London Underground stations, including St. Cannerwells and Melling Road Junction, together with a request for three mission-ready Huntsmen. Mika sighed. They had conducted multiple searches of all abandoned Underground stations in the weeks since the Tube Riders had gone on the run, but the same old scents had come up time and again. It was clear that the four active Tube Riders had escaped, and any other scents belonged to people no longer associated with the gang, or homeless who had used the stations for shelter.
Except now she had a new lead. The scent picked up by Sorel during the mob attack at Goldhawk Road indicated a renegade Tube Rider, perhaps someone who had once run with the gang. Mika grimaced. Dreggo wanted three Huntsmen. Sorel was an obvious choice, but what of the other two? During the hunt for the Tube Riders the Huntsmen had been responsible for several brutal murders out in Reading GFA and Bristol, allegedly on Dreggo’s orders, which made Mika reluctant to release more Huntsmen into her charge. As Head of Scientific Research, she felt responsible if innocent people died. She had no issue with the deaths of government dissenters, but had no desire to have the blood of law-abiding citizens on her hands.
She sat down at her computer terminal, opening up her data files on the extensive list of engineered beings currently held in the research facilities and holding pens.
Unless the situation was a critical risk to the Governor’s rule or safety, she couldn’t bring herself to approve release of the Huntsmen as per Dreggo’s request. She ran a finger down a list of different prototypes, frowning as she read over the testing results. Too many were unpredictable, incapable of following orders. The people of London were on a knife edge, ready to boil over into outright civil war. It would only take one more public slaughter to set them off.
What she needed was stealth.
She tapped a finger against a screen. Two prototypes in Dreggo’s former grade had performed well in testing. Nothing to suggest they would break rank when set loose. After Dreggo’s escape, several modifications had been made to make them less autonomous, but it might be enough. Former Tube Rider associates needed to be captured and brought in for interrogation, not slaughtered out in the open.
Confident that she could use her authority to swing Dreggo’s request around, Mika began to type up her recommendations in a report for the Governor. All she had to do was make sure she got it right.
If she got it wrong, she would no longer have to worry about the deaths of anyone else.
13
Remains
‘How many times have I got to tell you, if I don’t want to do it I’ll say.’
David shrugged. ‘Well, if you’re sure….’
Airie punched his arm. ‘I’m sure.’
‘Okay then.’
Above them, the grey London skies threatened rain. Out in the open David felt a little conspicuous, but here in the old siding yard at Hackney Central they were unlikely to be disturbed among the rusting hulks of dozens of retired trains. The abandoned locomotives had long since been picked clean of anything worth scavenging, and the only people using the old carriages for shelter were a handful of mindless loners who left them well alone.
Weeds had grown up over the old siding platform since David had last been here. Marta had taught him the basics of tube riding at this very spot, and for Airie’s benefit he now did his best to recall everything she had told him. In front of them, parked forever more by the siding platform, was the rusting remains of a decommissioned London Underground train.