The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘How many for coffee, then?’

  ‘Leave it, Suki.’ Bryant went to her and took the packet away. ‘We’re all going to go for a ride.’

  ‘Oh no, Michael.’ For the first time that Chris could detect, he saw a crack in Suki’s social armour. ‘You’ve drunk too much, you’re just going to get someone killed.’

  ‘No, Carla’s going to drive.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll believe that when I see it. Carla, honestly, the number of times he’s let me behind the wheel, then yanked me out again at the first serious sign of—’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Carla. Suki, it’s the weekend, it’s nearly midnight, there’s nothing on the roads. Just out on the orbital, as far as the M11 hook up. Carla drives there, I’ll drive back. C’mon, it’ll be fun.’

  True to Mike’s prediction, the orbital was a ghost highway. Nothing more substantial than waste paper stirred beneath the march of gull-winged sodium lamps. There was no sound other than the rush of their tyres on the asphalt and the comfortable growl of the Omega Injection engine. Carla drove with a rapt expression on her face at a rock-steady hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, occasionally swerving from lane to lane as chunks of decaying surfacing flashed towards them. A faint rain fell on the big oval windscreen, cleaned off meticulously by the gapped speed wipers.

  ‘Crawler,’ said Mike Bryant from the passenger seat, as the tail lights of a transporter appeared on the sweep of motorway ahead of them. ‘Looks like it’s automated; only a machine drives in the slow lane with this much road to play with. Pass him close, see if you can trip the collision systems.’

  Next to Chris in the back, Suki sighed. ‘You are such a child, Michael. Carla, just ignore him.’

  The BMW flashed past the transporter, giving it a wide berth. Mike sighed and shrugged. Up ahead, the lights of a junction glowed like a UFO landing site. A massive metal sign announced the M11 ramp. Carla pulled across into the filter lane and eased off the accelerator, letting the BMW’s speed bleed away on the approach slope. They cruised to a gentle halt at the summit, just short of the roundabout. Carla sat for a moment, listening to the engine run, then nodded.

  ‘Very smooth,’ she said, almost to herself.

  ‘Isn’t it.’ Mike Bryant cracked open his door. ‘Swap places. There’s a couple of things I want to show you.’

  Carla met Chris’s eyes in the rearview mirror for a moment, then she got out and walked round the front of the car, passing Bryant halfway. Bryant high-fived her, came round and fastened himself into the driving seat with a broad grin. He waited until Carla had also belted herself in, then dropped the car into gear and revved hard against the parking brake. Chris heard the wheels spin and shriek for a moment as the BMW held position, then Bryant knocked off the brake and they leapt forward.

  ‘Always forget that bit.’ Bryant shouted above the engine and he grinned in the mirror. The car plunged down the ramp opposite, gathering speed and hit the main carriageway of the orbital at nearly a hundred and twenty. Bryant let them cover about half a kilometre, then slapped his forehead.

  ‘Wait! This isn’t the way home!’

  He grinned again, then hauled on the wheel. Chris heard his feet hit the pedals at the same moment and was just too late to brace himself and Suki as the BMW executed a perfect U-turn dead stop in the centre lane.

  ‘Michael,’ said Suki severely. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Let’s try that again,’ said Bryant and kicked the BMW into another wheel-spinning takeoff. They flashed back towards the intersection, swerving into the slow lane on the slight incline under the bridge. Bryant turned round to look at Chris and Suki.

  ‘Now, you know that—’

  They trampled him down with their voices.

  ‘Michael!’

  ‘Look at the fucking r—’

  ‘Don’t tur—’

  In the time it all took to begin saying, Bryant had turned back to a more conventional driver’s posture and they were under the bridge and climbing the incline up on the other side.

  ‘Shit, sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just going to say, you know that truck we passed a couple of klicks back—’

  The interior of the car flooded with light as the automated transporter cleared the crest of the rise ahead and bore down on them. Suki, Chris and Carla uttered another multiple yell and this time Bryant yelled with them, louder than anyone. The transporter’s robot brain blasted them with an outraged hoot from the collision alert system and bands of orange hazard-warning lights lit up on the cab. Mike’s burlesque Sands accent reappeared, cut with wide-eyed, breathless psycho.

  ‘I’m sorry, honey. I guess I. Just shouldna. Taken all those drugs.’

  He laughed maniacally and, at the last moment, he yanked the wheel and the BMW swung violently to the left. They slid out of the path of the oncoming juggernaut and past the high side of the transporter’s wagon, so close that through the side window Chris saw individual dents in the metal surface of the freight container. He heard the hissing explosion of brakes across the night air, and knew that Bryant had just gone ahead and done what he’d asked Carla to do earlier. He’d deliberately tripped the transporter’s collision systems. He’d been playing chicken with the machine’s reflexes. For fun.

  Much later, back in his own car, he watched the same stretch of road again while Carla drove them home. Had he been a little more aware of his immediate surroundings, he would have seen Carla open her mouth to speak several times before she finally made up her mind.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was my fault. I didn’t—’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t think he’d force it like—’

  ‘He was just making things clear,’ said Chris distantly.

  They rode in silence.

  ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ said Carla after a while.

  Chris nodded wordlessly.

  ‘Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.’ She laughed without humour. ‘And to think I said you were going to wreck him in a couple of years’ time. Jesus, irony or wha—’

  ‘Carla, I’d really prefer not to talk about it, alright.’

  Carla looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed, but if she’d planned to be angry, what she saw in his face drained the anger out of her. Instead, she reached across to take his hand in hers.

  ‘Sure,’ she said very quietly.

  Chris took up the offered clasp, squeezing her fingers tightly. A faint smile twitched at his mouth, but his eyes never left the road ahead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In architectural echo of service pyramid theory, the Shorn block had rented out its bottom two levels to a series of shopping and eating units that collectively went under the name Basecamp. According to the Shorn promotional literature that Chris had read, Basecamp provided employment for over six hundred people and, together with the Shorn-owned vehicle repair shops in the basement, was a working embodiment of the virtues of trickle-down wealth creation. Prosperity spread out from the foundations of the Shorn block like vegetation from an aquifer, said the literature warmly, though the metaphor that occurred to Chris was water leaking from the cracked base of an old clay flowerpot. Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

  On the street opposite the Shorn complex the prosperity had blossomed - or leaked - into the form of a tiny corner restaurant called Louie Louie’s. Originally set up in the previous century to serve the butcher’s market that had once stood where the Shorn complex now loomed, the place had closed down briefly during the domino recessions and then reopened under new management, supplying coffee and snacks to the post-recessional influx of workers in Basecamp. This much Chris had gleaned from Mike Bryant when they went across for coffee one morning. What he noticed on his own was that the place never seemed to close and that, whether through inverted snobbery or genuine quality, the execs in the Shorn tower sent out to Louie Louie’s in preference to almost any other eating establishment i
n the district.

  The coffee, Chris was forced to admit, was the best he’d had in the UK, and he derived a further, ridiculously childish, satisfaction from drinking it out of the tall styrofoam canister while he stood by the window of his office and gazed down fifty-odd floors to the dimly illuminated frontage of the place it had been made. He was doing exactly that, and bluffing his way through an audiophone local-agent call from Panama, when Mike Bryant came to call.

  ‘Well, you go and tell El Commandante that if he wants his Panthers of Justice to have bandages and mobile cover next month he’d better reconsider that stance. All the phones—’

  He broke off as someone banged on the half-open door. Turning from the window, he saw Bryant shouldering his way into the office. In the big man’s arms were two packages wrapped in fancy black and gold paper. The bottom package was wide and flat and about the width of Bryant’s shoulders, the top one about the size and shape of two hardcopy dictionaries taped together. Both looked to be heavy.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ Chris said and clicked the audiophone off.

  ‘Hi, Chris.’ Bryant grinned. ‘Got something for you. Where do you want it?’

  ‘Over there.’ Chris gestured at a small table in the corner of the still minimally furnished office space. ‘What is it?

  ‘Show you.’

  Bryant put down the packages and ripped back the wrapping on the flat package to reveal the chequered surface of a marbled chess board. He grinned up at Chris again, freed the board from the wrapping entirely and set it straight on the table.

  ‘Chess?’ Chris asked stupidly.

  ‘Chess,’ agreed Bryant, working on the wrapping of the other box. It came loose and he tipped the box sideways, spilling carved onyx pieces across the board.

  ‘You know how to set this up?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ Chris came forward and picked up some of the pieces, weighing them in his hand. ‘This is good stuff. Where’d you get it?’

  ‘Place in Basecamp. They were having a sale. Two for the price of one. I’ve got the other one set up in my office. Here, give me the white ones. You do the black. Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘Fucking Harris in Panama. Got problems with the Nicaraguan insurgents again, and of course Harris won’t take a fucking decision on his own because he’s five hundred klicks off the action. He’s not sure of the angles.’

  Bryant paused in mid-action. ‘He said that?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘So he called someone who’s five thousand klicks off to decide for him? You ought to call in the audit on that guy. What’s he on anyway, three per cent of gross?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Audit the fucker. No, better yet, call a retender. Let’s see him fight for his fucking three per cent like we have to.’

  Chris shrugged. ‘You know what it’s like out there.’

  ‘What, better the scumbag that you know?’

  ‘You got it.’ Chris put the final black pawn in place and stood back. ‘Very nice. Now what?’

  Bryant reached out to the white files.

  ‘Well, I don’t know much about this game, but apparently this is a fairly good way to start.’

  He moved the white king’s pawn forward two squares and flashed another grin.

  ‘Your move.’

  ‘Do I have to decide now?’

  Bryant shook his head. ‘Call me with it. That’s the idea. Oh, and listen. That thing with Harris. I had the exact same shit with him over Honduras last year. Wish I’d called the retender then, but it was a sensitive time. Is this a sensitive time?’

  Chris thought about it for a moment.

  ‘No. They’re plugged up in the jungle somewhere, nothing going to happen till the rain stops.’

  Bryant nodded. ‘Call the retender,’ he said, pointing a cocked finger pistol downward, execution-style. ‘I would. Get that motherfucker Harris either dead or jacked up and working properly for you. You ever been to Panama?’

  ‘No. Emerging Markets stuff was all further south. Hammett McColl were into Venezuela, the NAME, bits of Brazil.’

  ‘Yeah, well, let me tell you about Panama.’ Bryant offered his grin again. ‘Just for your information. The place is stuffed full of agents who’ll do Harris’s job twice as well for half the money. You offer one and a half, maybe two per cent of total, they’ll rip his fucking heart out and eat it. Down there they do the tendering in converted bullrings, gladiator-style.’ The American burlesque came on full. ‘Real messy.’

  ‘Delightful,’ muttered Chris.

  ‘Fuck it, Chris, he deserves it.’ Bryant’s brow creased with good-humoured exasperation. He held out his hands, palms up. ‘That’s our investment he’s fucking with. If he can’t cut it, well, get someone who can. Anyway, not my account, not my call. Speaking of which, I’ve got some calls to make. You coming out to play tonight? Up for the Falkland again?’

  Chris shook his head. ‘Promised Carla we’d eat out in the village. Maybe some other time.’

  ‘Okay. What about cutting work early, coming down to the firing range with me. Just for an hour or so, before you go home. Get the feel of that Nemex, in case you ever decide to put bullets in it.’

  Chris grinned reluctantly. ‘That’s not fair. At least I was carrying mine. Alright, alright. I’ll come down and play in the arcade for an hour. But that’s all. After that, I’m off. Meet you down there at six, say.’

  ‘Done.’ Bryant shot him with the finger pistol and left.

  Chris stood and looked at the chessboard for a while, then he moved the black king’s pawn hesitantly out two spaces, so it was faced off against its white counterpart. He frowned over the move, shifted the piece back a space, hesitated some more then pulled an irritated face and restored the pawn to the face off position. He went back to his desk and stabbed rapidly through a number from memory.

  ‘Panama Trade and Investment Commission,’ said a Hispanic woman’s voice in English. The speaker swam into focus on the screen and recognised him.

  ‘Señor Faulkner, how can we help you?’

  ‘Get me Tendering,’ said Chris.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told Carla that evening over margaritas and fajitas in the village Tex-Mex. ‘I thought after that shit on the orbital last week, the battle lines were drawn. I felt like a fucking idiot for all that stuff I’d been saying to you about us staying friends. But I was right. He wants to be my friend.’

  ‘Or he’s scared of you.’

  ‘Same difference. I seem to remember someone telling me once that same-sex friendships are just a way of negating competition. Now who was that?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said that’s what Mel thinks. I didn’t say I agreed with him.’

  Chris grinned. ‘Well, he’d know about same-sex friendships, I suppose. From a real in-depth point of view.’

  ‘Don’t be a wanker, Chris.’

  ‘Hey, come on. It was a joke.’ Chris hung onto his smile, but there was a tiny feeling of slippage somewhere inside him. There had been a time, he was sure, when Carla could read him better than this. ‘You know I’ve got nothing against Mel or Jess. A whole stack of the people I worked with at HM were gay. Jesus Carla, before I met you I was sharing a flat with two gay guys.’

  ‘Yeah, and you used to make jokes about them.’

  ‘I—’ But the oozing sense of unfairness was already setting in, like cold mud, chilling his mood and tugging his smile away. ‘Carla, they used to make jokes about me too. They called me the household het, for fuck’s sake. It was all part of the banter. I’m not homophobic. You know that.’

  Carla looked at her food, then up at him.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ She mustered a small smile. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.’

  ‘Who fucking isn’t?’ Chris took an overly large pull at his margarita and said nothing more for a while.

  Fajitas are not a dish to be eaten in resentful silence, and neither of them did much more than pick at the food. Wh
en the waiter stopped by he sensed the mood radiating out from the little table and took the cooling dishes away without comment.

  ‘Any dessert?’ he asked carefully when he returned.

  Carla shook her head, mute. Chris drew a deep breath.

  ‘No thanks.’ He made a sudden decision. ‘But you can bring me another margarita. In fact, make it another pitcher.’

  ‘I don’t want any more, Chris,’ said Carla sharply.

  He looked at her with a blank expression he knew would hurt her. ‘Who asked you? Pitcher’s for me.’ He nodded at the waiter, who withdrew with obvious relief. Carla put on her disdainful face.

  ‘You’re going to get drunk?’

  ‘Well, looking at the logistics, I would think so. Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to get drunk.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

  ‘Chris ...’

  He waited, going nowhere near the opening the forlorn fade in her voice had left him. Her shoulders slumped.

  ‘I’m going home,’ she said.

  ‘Okay. Want them to call you a cab?’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ she said coldly. ‘It isn’t far.’

  ‘Fine.’ He buried himself in the margarita glass as she got up. She hesitated towards him for just a second, barely leaning, and then something stiffened in her carriage and she walked away from the table. Chris very carefully did not look round to watch her leave and when she stalked past the window of the restaurant, he busied himself with his drink again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she did not look in at him.

  He worried for a while about her walking home alone, but then stopped himself, recognising the feeling for guilt over the fight. Hawkspur Green was a hamlet, made ludicrously prosperous by the influx of driver-class professionals and their families. It had crime levels appropriate to a playgroup, nothing beyond occasional vandalism and even that mostly graffiti tagging. Plus Carla could look after herself and the house was barely fifteen minutes away. He was just manufacturing excuses to go after her.