“Oh, I never heard it before!” she said between whoops. I almost had to slam her hand down on the chair back before I could let her stand alone. She seemed to want to hang onto me. I felt cruel at pushing her away, but need drove me back to the glass hatch.
Inside, as I had hoped, the chest plate had formed a mouthlike opening. I pulled at the hatch on the tank but it wouldn't move. “Quick,” I said, “how do I get this thing open?” I was also calling frantically for Nine, but my head was empty enough that I heard my thoughts echo.
“Open?” she was clutching the chair, putting it between herself and me. “It's far too dangerous.”
“Please,” I said, resisting the impulse to rush over, pick her up, and shake her. “I've got to get inside it.”
“I can't,” she said, but her eyes darted left, towards her workstation and I saw the control set lying there, a thin flake of electronics. As I made a lunge for it she scuttled aside and pressed the emergency nurse-call, obviously thinking I was in need of help, or maybe just for someone to cling to. After all, she knew the suit better than I did on a physical level.
I looked at the keypad. It was on code. “What's the number?” I demanded.
Billingham quivered. She was so intimidated that I hated myself for what I did next, but there was no time and my friend was about to die. I ran across the room, slammed her against the wall with my full bodyweight, and screamed at her, “Tell me those fucking numbers before I shove this controller down your throat!” The controller was in my right hand and it shook, but my left was around her neck. She gabbled out the code in a welter of bleating, and I hoped I'd heard it right as I keyed it in, my right hand jammed against the soft puffiness of her shoulder to steady it. At the sound of an air seal opening I thrust myself away from the wall and back to the tank.
Pulling my sleeve up to my elbow, I reached inside and groped around inside the narrow slot, foul wetness streaking my arm and trickling down to my fingers. The hard plastic edges of the diary snapped at my weak nails, making them break as I tried to unjam it from where it was wedged tight in the wounded armourplate. It wouldn't come. In agony I flung the hatch aside, lifted out the whole thing and slammed it down on Billingham's delicate workbench, green slime splattering everywhere. I picked up the most brutal-looking of her tools—something like a lump hammer—and brought it down as hard as I could on the cavity area. There was a faint snap and a small dent appeared. I raised the hammer and smashed it down again and again and again, until my arms shook so badly they lost their strength. On a final lift, the hammer flew backwards out of my grasp and imbedded itself in the soft wall covering behind me.
I glanced at Billingham, who had curled herself into a ball in the corner, hands over her head. She was whispering something, but I couldn't hear it. Groping again inside the crumpled gap, the hardened grip of the shell was nothing more than a tatter over my hand. I extracted the book and quickly stuffed it down the back of my pants, tightening my belt to hold it there and pulling my shirt out to cover the bulge. For the first time I was glad I had a sizeable butt to prop it on. I took the chest plate back to the tank, shut the hatch, and made it to the sink unit to clear up just as Klein and the duty nurse came in together. They rushed for poor Dr. Billingham and then I heard Klein stand up.
“Anjuli?” she asked, astonished.
I turned around. The room was covered in green bits. She was staring at the handle of the hammer, poking out of the hole in the wall. She was about to say something else, but suddenly every beeper and alarm on the floor started going off. In a kind of slo-mo I saw the nurse straightening up in reaction to the noise, ready to dash off to whatever the emergency was. Billingham's scared eyes swivelled in her face, looking every which way for possible threats. Klein whirled automatically towards the door, before she glanced down at her handpad, clipped to her belt. “We've lost contact with the platform!” she cried, and my head filled with a slow, soft burst of static like the sound of rain on the roof. In the tank something thrashed and flopped in a grand mal of agony.
As sharply as they had begun, all the sounds cut. Our ears rang with silence.
We all stayed where we were, hardly daring to move. The nurse made impulses towards the door, and back to the prostrate doctor. Billingham herself closed her eyes. Klein stared at the burgeoning readouts on her handpad, rigid as a mannequin. I stood and listened. It seemed like it was the quietest the world had ever been.
Then Klein confirmed what I already knew: “901’s down.”
At that moment the diary wedged against my back became the most important thing in the world to me. It didn't matter what lame shit Roy had put in it; I owed it to myself to find out and play the game to the end.
Klein met my gaze with pity and amazement.
“OK,” I said, gathering my scanty resources, “901’s gone, part thanks to you. All bets are off. Either you let me out of here right now, implant and all, or I shop you to Vaughn. I can still contact the station comms units.” That was bollocks, but she wasn't to know. “You're stuck down here with no links, and he has the whole platform eating out of his hand.”
Now the nurse and Billingham were staring at me as well. I could see the nurse had a patch sedative in her hand, ready to administer to someone, but she seemed completely stunned. Billingham was watching me with curiosity and something maybe akin to admiration, but it was hard to tell through her fingers. Klein regarded me with a look which increased in frigidity with every second.
“And desert Augustine,” she asked, “leaving him to us?”
She was about as sharp as the suit. “I'll see him again,” I said.
She shook her head and tutted. “Maybe he wasn't wrong about you.”
“Spare me the bullshit,” I said, “I'm going to get my bag and then I'm going to leave OptiNet property for the last time, and you're not going to follow me or send any killers or try to bribe me with your crap.”
“You realize, once Vaughn is gone, you have nothing against me,” she said, the soul of reason.
“By then I'll have forgotten you,” I said, “and you won't give a damn about me.”
“I thought you never forgot a thing.”
“Yeah—” I felt myself getting stronger as the adrenalin peaked “—well, nobody's perfect.”
She waited, thinking, folded her arms across her chest, the handpad ignored. Behind her the nurse asked tentatively, “Dr. Klein?”
“Mmn?” She half turned towards the woman. “Yes, nurse…go get Dr. Billingham here a nice hot drink, why don't you?”
The nurse was glad of any excuse. When the door bumped quietly shut behind her, we resumed our face-off. Klein broke it by throwing her hands up. “Ugh,” she sighed, “I'm too old for this. And I'm sorry about Nine…I didn't think they'd be stupid enough to rush it through like that, really.” She looked at me and I believed her. “I didn't want this to happen.” She looked back at the hammer handle and the blitz of stinking algae. “So—” she gave me a sideways single-eyebrow lift “—did you kill it dead?”
“No, it's fine,” I said, letting my vigilance relax a little. She could have been a master bluffer, but I didn't see any reason for her to hold yet more underhanded motives. “You can still use it for research to help Augustine.” For some reason my hand's crazy trembling was starting to spread. I felt my legs weakening at the knee, and fought it. “Can you call me a taxi?”
She squinted at me, very uncertain. “No,” she said at last, having made some internal decision, “I don't think I want to know.” Then: “Come on. They'll get a new line up soon. I'll say you left during the blackout.” She held her hand out to me.
I took it and we shook, and then we both went and helped Billingham out of her corner and into a comfortable chair in the corridor outside.
“What about the operation?” I asked as another nurse went to fetch my belongings.
“I'll tell them it was done. Surgeon Schmidt will support me. We'll say the crash of Nine rendered it too damaged to sa
ve, and that we disposed of it.” She paused and added, “And if I have anything to say to you in the future, I'll call you.”
It was an unnaturally big favour she was doing me.
“Don't thank me,” she said, escorting me to the lifts and handing me my overnight bag. “I owed Nine.”
I glanced along the corridor to Augustine's room, the door closed and quiet. In her chair Billingham was mopping her face with a handkerchief. She glanced timidly at me and I lifted one hand, which waved of its own accord. I thought I saw her smile, but the lift doors opened. Time to go.
I rode alone down to street level, shaking all over. The bag weighed a ton and my arms hurt from the hammer blows so that I could hardly hold it. Outside the lobby the air was icy cold, with a bitter east wind full of Siberian frost. I stood in it for a few minutes before the car drew up, and inside the contrast of its warm air to the winter chill stifled me so that within a few moments of giving it my home address I was out cold.
I dreamt I was lying helpless and tiny in a gigantic hospital bed. My hand was a huge steel claw and my feet were chrome talons, but I couldn't move. A friendly nurse was there, with dusty blonde hair and a casebook in her hand in which she wrote everything I said. I was pleading with her to put me back inside my skin and sobbing—huge chest-racking gulps of air that hurt as my peeled flesh rubbed against the softness of the sheet. But she just kept on smiling.
“Miss O'Connell? Miss O'Connell? Wake up.”
I opened my eyes slowly. My limbs ached and my chest was hollowed out with a dull pain which came and went with my breathing. For a moment I had no idea where I was. It was dark, but then the taxi spoke again.
“Miss O'Connell? I'm afraid your road is blocked and this is as close as I'm allowed. I'll have to ask you to alight here.”
I struggled out of the painful sideways slump my body had adopted on the seat, and looked around. Through the windscreen I could see that we were parked on Linden Avenue South. The opening of Sycamore Drive, with its familiar old trees huge and dark on either side, was blocked by red-and-white emergency barriers. A police car, its bodywork pulsing rapid blue light, stood on the other side of it, and three or four officers walked in and out of view, directing curious passersby to go home. A few reluctant knots of people lingered just out of range of the barrier's glowing red ground light so their names weren't taken for ticketing, and one had climbed into the lower branches of a tree to get a better view.
I paid the taxi with my cashcard and slid out of the door to stand on the icy pavement. I was so foggy-headed I thought that maybe I'd been drugged in some way. As I moved through the freezing night air towards the barrier I was aware only of a total numbness in body and mind. Then, as I saw past the police car, my heart began to pound. Huge nightblaster lights, the kind they use for forensic work in the dark, were ranged on the street. Dogs and their handlers were clustered around a little heat-stove set up on the empty road, and a steady stream of officers in and out of uniform were walking up and down the path to my house. Beyond them an ambulance was just closing its doors and beginning to pull away from the curb.
Moving as fast as I could, I skidded along the pavement and brushed past the people standing transfixed. I ignored their protestations and stumbled headlong into the barrier. It beeped to warn me that I was about to be registered for a fine if I didn't stop fooling with it. I ducked under it and a blast on his personal alarm brought one of the policemen running.
Glancing at his lapel information he said breathlessly, “No residents at the moment, miss. Please use the back entrance to your home by going down the walk-alleys to the side.”
“That's my house,” I said dumbly.
He turned, quite unnecessarily, to look at it. “Then you must be…”
“Anjuli O'Connell, 22 Sycamore Drive. That's my house. What's going on?”
“I think you'd better come with me.” He took hold of my sleeve gently and began to direct me towards his curious fellow officers and the car.
I wrenched my arm out of his grip. “What the hell is going on?” I tried to root myself to the spot, feet braced in case he tried to drag me after him. “Who's in the ambulance?”
He turned crossly and reached out again, but thought better of it as I started to shake with anger and fear. “There's been a burglary,” he began.
“Yeah, you always shut off the road for that?” I said and set off past him towards the brilliant light pool. Abruptly two of the dogs and their handlers, responding to some call, set off at a run and disappeared along a pedestrian throughway which led between the houses of our grid and into a little wood. I tried to run, but my fancy shoes for court were hopeless on the wet road, and I slipped and fell even before he could grab me.
“Will you listen?” He helped me to my feet. “I'm sorry,” he added, suddenly confused by his anger at me and the bad news he had to tell me. “There was a burglary which your brother, Mr. Ajay O'Connell, interrupted. He was injured. See…?” He pointed at the ambulance as it nosed through a gap in the barriers at the far end of the road.
I watched it for a second or two. It moved gently, pulsing white, but it waited for the traffic before it turned towards the city road. “Why isn't it going fast?” I said. I looked at him and it was there in his face. Ajay was dead.
Abruptly, I felt a silly fool, standing there in the street, coat and bag askew. I didn't want to be there, marooned like a whale, helpless in front of strangers, but I didn't know where else I could go. Probably it was better to just stand here until something suggested itself, my thoughts said. Surely someone will find out they were mistaken. Maybe it isn't even my house—but, no, they knew our names.
“Miss O'Connell?”
The policeman was peering at me with concern. He was frightened in case I turned hysterical on him—I could see that—and was glancing anxiously as two others joined us.
“Why don't you get into the car and have a hot drink?” a woman officer said. She picked up my bag, which had come off my shoulder and was lying on the ground. I let her take it, and then take my hand. We sat in the warm car and she gave me a hot chocolate from the dispenser there, and then cleaned out the grit from the grazes on my palms. I let her. I sat. If Vaughn had come and led me off a cliff, I would have let him.
The officer told me that they had reason to suspect a professional assault on the house rather than an ordinary burglary. Ajay had been attacked with an advanced blacktek kind of military weapon not used by any common criminals in Europe. Due to my appearance at the trial they thought it may be related to the case. It had happened only a half hour before. A very short time after the 901 crash, she said. So short that, if it was related, then they must have been waiting.
She didn't need to point out the rest to me. A revenge killing because I'd failed Nine.
Confirmation came within an hour. Freetech, the Machine Green action unit, claimed responsibility. The police cornered someone in a house at Greengates. There was a short firefight. Two police officers were killed and the suspect was shot dead by a marksman with an AI rifle. When the weapon was recovered they found it was homemade, butchered together from a series of discontinued components, unstable and dangerous. The suspect was already half immobilized from using it before they found him. I thought I knew who'd made it, but I didn't say anything. I had no interest in any of it now. What was the point?
I spent the rest of the night in hospital after all, this time the public free hospital at Armley. On the following day I was allowed back to the house, and the police took me there and even gave me a clerk on loan to help me tidy up and to keep an eye on me in case of further reprisals. They assured me of priority status and a constant presence in the area, or something like that; I wasn't really listening and couldn't be bothered to exercise any of my memory to tell me. In fact my head was remarkably quiet, and I wanted it to stay that way. I stared into the distance.
Coming home wasn't that easy, however, and my attempts at rejecting the world failed almost immedi
ately.
We drew up at the gate, and the clerk—a polite young man, very quiet—and I got out of the car. The gate hung open a few inches into the street. I stared at it and then looked up at the front garden, trampled by the police and gouged with the track marks of a robot scanner. On the house itself, usually a perky kind of character like most of the houses on the street, the windows were shut tight. The filigree of prostrate birch branches which covered the exterior walls—a popular fashion in plant surfaces a few years ago—stood out starkly against the stone colour and the grey sky. Nothing moved. The glass panels were all darkened, as if it was night. I touched the gate but there was no response. It swung smoothly under my hand, silent.
My house was dead, too.
They'd killed my house.
I walked up the path and turned to see the clerk carefully latching the gate behind him. He touched it with care and glanced at me, cautious. I turned back to the house. It remained motionless as I reached the step, like a building from the twentieth century, inert as the matter it was made of. I had the peculiar sense of falling into a universe more ordinary, backwards in time. If I stayed here and let it roll forwards again, maybe they would all come back.
The door remained shut in my face. When the clerk reached my shoulder I made myself lift the cover off the manual keys panel. A police stud was in place, locking it to all access, and I had to endure the humiliation of letting him open it for me. He pushed the door open into the dark hall and waited for me to go inside.
I didn't think I could take much of this on my own, so I asked him to hold on there while I made a call. I initialized the implant without thinking, and an unfamiliar operator's voice came on inside my head. It was a brassy American tone, loud, obviously ill-tempered with the volume of work, and assuming itself logged into the dregs of the phone system as it got no picture and a rush of static from the mass of information the exchange couldn't make head or tail of.
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