by Eric Brown
Max raced the taxi towards the interface, and only when it was fifty metres from the portal did the guards realise the danger and attack. A line of fire hit the back of the cab, swiping it a full three-sixty degrees and shredding its tyres. The driver’s door flew open. Ella shook her head, watching through a veil of tears. Max dived from the taxi, sprinted towards the ‘face, dodging the matrices of tracer like a trained combat soldier. Ella was unsure whether he was finally hit by the guard’s fire, or if he detonated the explosion himself. The result was the same. Where Max had been, a blinding white starburst exploded. Ella yelled aloud and closed her eyes in pain. When she opened them again, she looked down on a scene-of utter devastation. The sunrise laid bloody light across a battlefield. At least two dozen guards lay dead; the taxi was blazing fiercely. Before the interface was a smouldering crater where Max’s body-bomb had blown. And the interface itself—Ella stared through her tears, her sobs turning into a kind of crazy laughter... The blue membrane of the interface was no more. The frame was scarred and burnt, the viewscreens shattered, and through it Ella saw the continuation of the tarmac. Never before had she beheld a redundant frame, but however much she tried to tell herself that this had been the aim of her colleagues, she could not accept that their sacrifice had been worthwhile.
She slumped, held her head in her hands and wept.
They’d used her, of course. The bastards had used her to gain their ends—and then deserted her.
Ella sat in the root system of the tree for a long time, considering her options. After perhaps an hour she cuffed the tears from her cheeks, stood and limped with the effects of cramp towards the concealed bike.
She dragged the bike from the undergrowth and, leaving the smouldering ruin of the interface in her wake, headed north towards the Falls.
* * * *
Chapter Nine
Hirst Hunter stood before the arched floor-to-ceiling window and stared out at the darkness stealing over the dying city. For the most part, the advance of night went unopposed: only the occasional district put up a fight in the form of street-lights and neon advertisements. The sight of the moribund city depressed him. It brought to mind the dream he’d been having of late, in which a vast area of light was falling to the gradual encroachment of a black malignancy.
The interface at Orly hung in the air to the south of the city, the blue sky of a colony world contrasting surreally with the Paris night. The portal dominated the skyline, and the pang of guilt it caused him was as sour as heartburn.
He poured himself another brandy and walked across the room to a north-facing window. Here the portal could not be seen, and night held sway totally; the only lights were high in the sky, the industrial orbitals whose profligate illumination mocked the barren land below.
He’d arrived in Paris three days ago and moved his retinue into the top floor of the old Victorian building which had once housed the city morgue. It was situated in a district so derelict and overgrown that the street gangs had been and gone long ago. The building stood squat and solid within its mantle of alien creeper, and the top floor provided the perfect retreat. Hunter had furnished the cavernous chambers of the mortuary with thick carpets, wall-hangings and chaises-longues—the polished wood and velvet antiques softening the rather harsh brass and marble fittings of the dissection room and cold storage area.
Hunter stood in his own room, a Spartan chamber furnished with a foam-form on which he slept and a crude bar consisting of half a dozen bottles of Thai brandy. Through the open door he could see the main room with its banks of computers and wall-screens. His bodyguards and advisers sat about smoking or watching vid-screen with a collective air of patient boredom. They had shown surprise at his choice of base, but had known better than to demur. They took it as just another indication of his morbid sense of humour.
Hunter sipped his brandy and considered his meeting with Mirren that morning. It had gone, all things considered, rather well. He had been concerned at first by intelligence reports which stated that Mirren was not a Disciple; he had feared that the Engineman might not crave the flux with the same degree of desperation as some of his believing colleagues. Their meeting had soon dispelled that fear. Mirren might be an atheist, but he desired union just as much as the next Engineman. In Hunter’s opinion it was these two factors which were tearing Ralph Mirren apart. He craved the flux, and yet he could not bring himself to believe that it was anything more than an extreme psychological effect. If only he would believe that the wonder of the union had its source in the nada-continuum, and not in his own head—and that union awaited everyone in the end -then Mirren might be a more content individual than he was. Hunter wondered whether the only thing that prevented Mirren taking his own life was the perceived oblivion to which he mistakenly believed he would be committing himself. Still, he craved the flux, and that, for the time being, was all that mattered.
Hunter shot the cuff of his silk jacket and glanced at his watch. It was not yet seven. He had another five hours before his meeting with Mirren and the others. He was debating whether to have another brandy when there was a knock on the open door.
Sassoon leaned through, holding the jamb, “We’ve located a third, sir.”
“Excellent! Is it far from here?”
“Clamart, about ten kilometres south-west. Miguelino found it, following up Kelly’s information.”
Hunter finished his brandy. “Is the car ready?”
“And waiting, sir.”
They descended in an ancient, clanking elevator and stepped into the basement of what had once been a spice warehouse. The reek of chilli and petrol fumes filled the air. The Mercedes roadster stood before the elevator gate, doors open and engine running. Hunter slipped into the back seat, Sassoon in the front next to Rossilini.
“Let’s hope that this is the one, gentlemen,” Hunter said as the car sped from the warehouse. Yesterday they had checked two machines in the northern suburbs, only to find that the first had been cannibalised to repair the second, and that the second was not only unreliable but hardly safe.
He sat back and regarded the passing buildings. They were soon moving through the wide avenues of central Paris, the only road vehicle on his stretch. Overhead, fliers streaked by, tail-lights dwindling, jet engines roaring fit to frighten a less competent driver than Rossilini off the road. They passed the central dome, a giant silver hemisphere surrounded by a fleet of tourist hover-coaches, and then turned south.
Before coming to Paris, Hunter had only ever read about the city, and seen documentaries about it on vid-screen. A great interest in art, which had consumed him for the past five or six years, had contributed to his anticipation of visiting this historic Mecca of so many renowned artists. He had been prepared for a city past it best, living on its reputation—but nothing had quite prepared him for the decrepitude of so much of the place, the apathy of its citizens, and the theme-park tourist attraction it had become.
His wife had been French. In the early days of their marriage he had planned trips to Earth and her native city, but always work out on the Rim had intervened. He had meant to do many things, visit many places, with Marie—and then one day the comfortable certainty of their future together was snatched away, and he faced the galling prospect of empty years alone, with only work to occupy him.
Grief was a strange thing. The old cliche about time healing all wounds was true—over the years the terrible injury of his loss had become almost bearable, but even so, from time to time, memories surfaced and the old wound was reopened.
He wondered whether this was why he resented this changed Paris so much: it was no longer the place of his wife’s childhood, the place they had one day planned to visit.
He told himself that once this business was over, and he could relax and enjoy himself, he would become a tourist and visit the galleries and exhibitions under the dome. And, hopefully, by then he would no longer be alone.
He was in danger of becoming maudlin, of dwelling too much on t
he personal. He returned his thoughts to the business at hand.
“Ah, Mr Rossilini...”
The driver half-turned his head. “Sir?”
“Mirren and the other Enginemen—I take it you’ve implemented my orders?”
“Of course, sir.”
“And everything is running smoothly?”
Rossilini nodded. “Mirren, Leferve, and Elliott are no problem. They live in Paris and rarely venture out of the city. Olafson and Fekete are a bit more difficult. Olafson lives in Hamburg, but I have a private operator trying to trace her, and Fekete has his own security team on the lookout for people showing an interest in him and his affairs. I’ve put Hassan on him, and he’s doing his best.”
“And our own operations?” Hunter lived in constant dread that their enemies had discovered what they were doing.
“There’s no-one the slightest bit suspicious here on Earth, and the Organisation has no idea where we are.”
How many times had Rossilini had to reassure him on that score over the past few days? He must have thought he was losing his nerve...
“Well, I hope you’re right, Mr Rossilini. I do hope you are right. I wouldn’t want the morgue to find itself in business again.”
Rossilini cleared his throat. “Of course not, sir.”
They passed from an unlighted, overgrown area — where the alien flora could be seen only in the glare of the headlights, silver-etched and eerie—to a suburb that was just as overgrown but bathed in the illumination of jerry-rigged arc-lights and neons powered by a private generator. The extraterrestrial vegetation obscured the buildings on both sides of the main street, lush and green, like something from the work of Henri Rousseau.
“We’re due to meet Miguelino at eight in the Nada Bar,” Sassoon said, pointing through the windscreen at a pulsing neon sign.
Rossilini braked the roadster before the bar and Hunter and Sassoon climbed out. Drinkers spilled from the gaudily flower-bedecked premises, many wearing silversuits even though they were too young to recall the hey-day of the space age.
Hunter eased his way through the crowd. The warm night air was heavy with the scent of burning narcotics and loud with computer-generated samba-jazz. Head throbbing, Hunter entered the Nada, a half-lighted, roughly triangular room done up to resemble the bridge of a bigship. As he made his way to the bar, he was aware of the stares directed at his facial disfigurement. On his homeplanet and even on the worlds of the Rim, genetic herpes was such a common trait that it aroused little comment. Only on his arrival in Paris had he been made aware of this facial feature being in any way unique. Indeed, some of his closer aides had questioned the advisability of being seen out on the streets of the city: he was a wanted man, after all, and among the citizens of Paris he was conspicuous, to say the least. In a bid to disguise his identity, he’d employed a cosmetician to extend his disfigurement so that it covered fully half his face, not just the upper left quarter that it had formerly occupied. To be on the safe side he had delegated most of his responsibilities, but had decided to go through with others himself. At this stage of the operation he was, after all, dispensable; any one of his aides could pick up where he left off, if the worst came to the worst, and successfully see through the operation. He wondered if his fatalism had anything to do with his desire to atone for the sins of his past.
Miguelino was sitting on a bar-stool, a tall glass in his hands between his knees. He signalled for two beers when Hunter and Sassoon joined him.
“Mr Miguelino,” Hunter greeted the Beta-Engineman, “you’ve certainly picked the most inhospitable of bars.”
“But appropriate,” Miguelino said in his usual dolorous baritone, passing them their beers.
“Oh, appropriate, I’ll grant you that,” Hunter said, glancing at the waiters in the uniforms of the various Lines, and the plasma graphics of the bigships on the wall behind the bar.
Sassoon asked, “Where’s your contact?”
The Engineman looked at his watch. “He was due in at eight. The bastard’s late.” Hunter noted that Miguelino was jumpy, which was not surprising in the circumstances. He was a short, squat Spanish colonial who’d worked with Hunter and Kelly out on the Rim. Indeed, after Kelly—who had remained on the Rim to conduct operations at that end—Miguelino was Hunter’s most trusted aide.
He sipped his beer and glanced around the packed bar-room, trying to filter the monotonous thump of the music from his consciousness. He killed time by attempting to spot the colonists among the crowd. One or two of the more freakishly tall revellers were obviously from low gravity worlds—Xyre or Cannon’s Landfall in the Core. One particularly squat citizen, almost as broad as she was tall, clearly hailed from a planet of extremely high gravity—Some-day-Soon or Zia-al-Haq. He saw no-one from his homeplanet of Fairweather.
Then he saw the small, dark girl standing against the far wall, talking to a young man. For a second, Hunter’s heart skipped—then he realised that he was mistaken. She was so very similar that it pained him to look at her. The girl looked him up and down with a glance of cool contempt. Hunter turned away, embarrassed. Even her superior disdain brought back painful memories.
Miguelino touched his elbow.
He followed the direction of the Engineman’s gaze and stared at the man approaching them through the crowd. At first he thought it was a dwarf on stilts. Certainly, his cramped facial features were those of a dwarf, and the fact that he walked with a peculiar lurching gait suggested stilts. Then he emerged from the press and Hunter saw that the man’s legs had been amputated at the thighs. From each naked stump a silver rod extended in place of the femur; the artificial legs were articulated at the knees with ball-joints, and terminated in wedge-shaped footpads. The dwarf wore a silversuit, had long grey hair and chewed the end of a cigar.
“Gentlemen,” he greeted them nervously. “How can I help you?”
“Cut the shit, Quiberon,” Miguelino snapped. “I told you—we know you have a tank.”
“You’re KVO officials?” Something like panic showed in his eyes.
“Just lead the way, Quiberon,” Miguelino said, “and no smart tricks. We have your place surrounded.”
Quiberon glanced at the three men. The cigar shuttled from one side of his mouth to the other. He hesitated, weighed up his options, then said, “Follow me.”
He led them through a door at the rear of the bar and across an empty street. The music receded in their wake. There were no lights here. Hunter was aware of a disgusting mulch underfoot, the occasional snagging grasp of a ground-vine. They came to a tall iron gate in a stone wall, the bars of which served as a trellis for the climbing plants. Quiberon, bobbing and lurching, unlocked the gate and ushered them through. Hunter clutched a small automatic pistol in his jacket pocket. They were in an ancient, ramshackle cemetery. By the faint light of the stars and the industrial orbitals, he made out lichened gravestones, coy statues of angels with trumpets, kitsch Madonna figures and the occasional blockhouse monstrosity of a family tomb. The alien vegetation had overtaken the place in a riot of vulgar blooms and speckled leaves, a profanity entirely in keeping with the maudlin sentimentality of the ecclesiastical architecture.
Quiberon stilted down a short flight of steps, unlocked and pushed open the timber doors of a subterranean crypt. He touched a wall-switch and flooded the interior with a dull red light. Hunter, Sassoon and Miguelino followed the elevated dwarf inside.
“My customers are eight E-men,” Quiberon said. “They wouldn’t give me away... How did you find out?”
Ignoring him, Hunter approached the tank installed in the corner of the crypt. Miguelino was beside him, silent, awed.
It was a Larsen Class II, a silver, torpedo-shaped flux-tank that Hunter guessed was no more than twelve years old. By the look of it, the tank had never seen service in a ‘ship.
Miguelino was down on his knees, caressing its streamlined length, checking its dials and metres. He might only have been a Beta, Hunter reflected, but al
l Enginemen, irrespective of their grade, craved the flux.
Quiberon looked from Hunter to Miguelino and back again. “Are you from the KVO?” he asked desperately. “You haven’t been snooping around for years. I thought the restrictions were being relaxed, that was the talk on the street. And I do provide a genuine service...” He eyed the Engineman, clearly unable to equate an official KVO investigation with the behaviour of Miguelino.