Penumbra

by Eric Brown

  Just after seven he braked in the car-park of the Hindustan Plaza and met the manager and head of security in the foyer. They were courteous to the point of servility; it was not every day that Ezekiel Klien consented to advise a hotel on the maintenance of its security systems.

  ‘Has the equipment been delivered?’ he asked as he rode the elevator up to the third-floor conference room.

  The manager nodded. ‘It’s set up and ready,’ he said. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I am that you agreed—’

  Klien turned him out. He might refuse commissions from world governments to advise them on security matters, but if an offer came along which he might turn to his own advantage, then he would graciously agree to lecture, even going so far as to donate his usual fee to charity.

  The security and communications company Inter-Tech had offered him fabulous sums to promote their latest range of computer communication devices. Klien had initially turned down their offer, and then had seen a way he might benefit from the deal.

  The hotel’s security team had followed his instructions to the letter. In a small room next to the conference room, accessible by a door which could be locked, a com-screen had been set up. The other was in the conference room itself.

  Klien watched the room fill up with about thirty men and women from various companies in the city, along with the hotel’s own security staff. He smiled to himself. As well as supplying himself with a foolproof alibi tonight, he could be assured that the security team was otherwise engaged.

  He was introduced by the manager and stood as applause filled the room.

  ‘Thank you . . . please ... As you know, I don’t usually accept invitations to endorse company products, but Inter-Tech’s latest range is in my opinion something very special . . . and I’d heard it rumoured that the hotel has one of the finest cellars in the sub-continent. To your good health.’

  He raised his glass and sipped as polite laughter greeted his quip.

  ‘Tonight I’d like to talk about the Inter-Tech Arrow 200 com-screen.’

  For the next thirty minutes he sang the praises of the Arrow 200’s design features and technical specifications, the screen’s reliability and range, peppering the advertisement with anecdotes and personal accounts of his experience with other screens over the years. The audience listened with genuine interest.

  At one point he glanced at his watch. It was just after eight. Ali Bhakor would be waiting for him on the fourth floor, room 180. It was time he was moving.

  ‘But enough of the talk,’ he said now. ‘I think it’s time for me actually to show the Arrow 200 in action. If you’ll bear with me for one moment. . .’

  He left the stage and moved into the adjoining room, quietly locking the door behind him. He approached the com-screen and loaded the recording he had made the day before. He switched on the screen. In the conference room, he could hear his relayed voice saying: ‘Thank you for your patience. Now, I think you will agree with me that the clarity of both sound and vision . . .’

  Heart hammering with the thrill of the risk, Klien pulled the fine net of fibre-optic capillaries from the inside pocket of his suit and drew the device over his head. In the same pocket was the activator. He fingered the touch-pad. Instantly he was aware of a haze of light in his vision. Seconds later his eyes adjusted, and he quickly slipped through the door to the corridor. To any casual observer he would no longer resemble Ezekiel Klien, but a man in his sixties with a hatchet-thin face and silver hair. The capillary net was, officially, still in its design stage. As chief of security at the spaceport, he had contacted a local software company and sponsored its manufacture. It was making his work a lot easier.

  He hurried along the corridor to the elevator and ascended to the fourth floor. His heart was pounding at a rate he only ever experienced on nights such as these. He tried to calculate the risk. The only possible danger was if the recording on the com-screen developed a hitch - and what an irony that would be! The pre-recorded disc would last fifteen minutes, allowing him what he considered to be more than enough time to get to the fourth floor, deal with Bhakor, and return.

  He knocked on the door of room 180, and seconds later it opened fractionally. A sliver of Bhakor’s dark face appeared. A blood-shot eye blinked at him. ‘Smith. Ah-cha. You have the slash?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Klien said, slipping into the room. He crossed the lounge and sat down.

  Bhakor returned from closing the door and lowered himself into the opposite armchair.

  Klien watched the man as he leaned forward nervously. It was always his main regret that he could not, before he despatched his victims, lecture them on the error of their ways, explain to them just why they had to die.

  Bhakor was impatient. ‘You have the slash?’

  Klien nodded. ‘Have you had a good life, Bhakor?’ he said.

  Bhakor blinked. ‘What? What do you—’

  ‘Are you ready to meet the judgement of your god?’

  Before Bhakor could react, Klien pulled the laser pistol from his inside pocket and fired at point-black range, the blast charcoaling the right side of the drug dealer’s head. He slumped back into the chair with a posthumous grunt. The flesh of his cheek was blackened and cracked and the stench of singed hair and pomade filled the room.

  Klien stood and pulled a razor from his pocket. Carefully, with almost loving exactitude, he sliced a crucifix in the plump flesh of the dead man’s left cheek. Then he hurried from the room, filled with an exultation and joy at the knowledge that he was doing God’s duty and sanitising this terrible world.

  Two minutes later he entered the small room on the third floor, pulled off his capillary net and waited five minutes for the recording to finish. He heard his voice from the next room: ‘. . . as I think you’ll agree. Thank you.’

  He pocketed the disc, unlocked the door and stepped through to stirring applause. He took his place on the stage, faced the audience and smiled.

  ‘Thank you. I can honestly say that I think that little display went very well. I, at least, am very pleased with the performance.’

  He wound down the talk, replying to a few predictable questions and thanking all present for being a knowledgeable and appreciative audience.

  He stayed behind briefly for drinks with the security team and selected guests. He made an appointment to visit the team and go through a few of the latest systems. He had to suppress a smile as he arranged a date with the head of security. He would certainly enjoy telling them what they should do in future to ensure that their guests were not murdered in their rooms. Surveillance cameras would, he thought, be a good start.

  Thirty minutes later Klien excused himself, left the hotel and drove into Calcutta city centre. He parked outside the opera house five minutes before the performance was due to begin, ordered a drink from the bar and slipped into the comfortable seat of his private box high above the stage.

  For the next two hours he put aside his consideration of the state of the planet and enjoyed the music. He had often wondered if his love of opera and his ability to kill were somehow linked. He thought that they might be. He was, after all, doing God’s bidding here on Earth, and it was as if his appreciation of the beauty of classical music was a gift from God, a reward, as it were, for services rendered.

  As the music swelled, Klien smiled to himself.

  Later that night, at home, he suffered another episode of his recurrent nightmare. He was back in a cavern far below ground and tall, grotesque aliens were performing their terrible ritual. This time, they were accompanied by the strains of Puccini’s La Bohème.

  Klien sat up with a startled cry and fumbled for the light pad. The images vanished, along with the terrible sense of evil that always accompanied the dream, and his breathing gradually returned to normal.

  Unable to sleep, he dressed and moved to his study. On the desk was the pile of pix he had left out the night before. He picked them up and stepped out on to the balcony. Spotlights in the ga
rden illuminated the white cladding of his dwelling. Five years ago he had moved to one of the most exclusive areas of the city and bought a luxurious polycarbon house on Allahabad Marg - a scaled-down version of the Sydney Opera House. Kitsch, he knew, but at the same time appealing.

  He sat on the lounger and shuffled through the pix. The first three showed a young Indian girl in a blue dress. She was perhaps eight or nine years old. The other three pix were computer-generated images, showing Sita Mackendrick as she might appear today, aged twenty-three.

  He laid the pix aside with a sigh. He had come to Earth from Homefall almost fourteen years ago on a mission more important to him than his own existence, and so far he had failed.

  His one hope, now, was if he could find the woman who was Sita Mackendrick.

  * * * *

  7

  Bennett stood before the plate-glass window of the observation gallery and watched the activity on the apron far below. After all his years in space, his experience piloting ships to orbit, there was still something about the sight of vessels blasting off from Los Angeles spaceport that filled him with excitement.

  He suspected it had something to do with childhood. As a kid he’d taken the coach from Mojave, against his father’s express instructions, to spend long afternoons watching ships lighting out for the stars. He had even brought Ella here once, his joy at the experience heightened by his sister’s obvious delight. He smiled to himself. It seemed a long time ago since he had dreamed of being a pilot; if only his younger self could have known that one day his dream would come true. He felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of how dreams fulfilled never satisfied the expectations of the dreamer. It had taught him never to dream, never to look too far into the future.

  The spaceport was a vast concrete plain that stretched away in every direction as far as the eye could see. Every half-kilometre the surface was pocked by a blast crater, a sunken collar of steel flanges in which the ships and shuttles squatted preparatory to take-off. Many of the vessels in the immediate vicinity of the observation gallery were ground-to-orbit ships, bulbous bell-shaped tubs squatting on powerful, flexed stanchions. There were only four big companies now, competing to win the stars. There’d been dozens during his childhood, and he’d meticulously memorised the livery of every shipping line.

  He watched as a supply shuttle rose from a nearby berth, and the thrill he recalled from childhood filled him now. The terminal building vibrated as if at the onset of an earthquake. He shielded his eyes from the blinding, actinic glare as the sleek ship powered into the lower atmosphere on the start of its journey to the orbitals.

  He left the gallery and made his way through the crowded concourse of the terminal building, showed his pass to a security guard and stepped out on to the tarmac. He walked around the building, away from the ear-splitting roar of departing vessels, to the area given over to machine shops, repair yards and hangars. Various shipping lines and colonial companies hired compounds within the port, areas the size of football fields secured by carbon-fibre fences. Consulting the map he’d picked up from the information desk, Bennett moved through a maze of compounds to the lot on the map marked with the letter M shot through with an arrow.

  To prepare himself, he had accessed GlobaLink and read more about the Mackendrick Foundation and Mackendrick himself. The Foundation had been set up by Mackendrick senior, Alistair, at the turn of the century, as a learning centre for a diverse set of scientific disciplines, all devoted to the discovery and understanding of other worlds. The initial idea was that the foundation should turn out multi-discipline scientists equipped to work on the many habitable planets of the Expansion. Over the years the aims of the foundation had broadened: under the direction of Charles Mackendrick, the foundation bought out a small shipping line in ‘56, and so the exploration arm of the company was founded.

  The biography of Charles Mackendrick himself read like the synopsis of some improbable holo-vision adventure story for kids. Trained at the Space Academy on Mars, Mackendrick had graduated as a light-drive engineer at nineteen, specialising in the then recently developed Schulmann-Dearing propulsion systems. For five years he worked for various lines servicing the colonies, along the way picking up a pilot’s diploma. At twenty-five he’d become the youngest chief pilot of an exploration vessel, in the employ of the Trans-Planetary Company. He had served on teams that had discovered and opened up a dozen worlds for colonisation, and in ‘50 had been among the first party of humans to locate and make contact with sentient extraterrestrial life-forms, the aliens known as the Phalaan. Six years later he had taken over the directorship of the Mackendrick Foundation and initiated the interstellar explorations, for which it was now principally known.

  Mackendrick himself was portrayed as a restless workaholic who until recently had lived for the exploration of uncharted space. A billionaire, he had retired from active planetary exploration just five years ago at the age of seventy.

  He sounded, Bennett decided on finishing the hagiographic biography, just the type of person he’d rather avoid: thrusting, dynamic and aggressive. Bennett had never met a successful businessman he had actively liked, but perhaps his opinion had been negatively tainted by the influence of his father. Admittedly, his preconception of Mackendrick had been formed by reading between the lines, and watching the tape Mackendrick had sent last night, in which he’d come over as loud, overbearing and confident of getting whatever, and whoever, he wanted.

  Bennett was unsure whether to be alarmed that the billionaire tycoon had singled him out for attention, or flattered. He did know that he was not exactly looking forward to the forthcoming meeting with Mackendrick.

  A chain-link carbon-fibre fence enclosed the Mackendrick Foundation compound, a sunken repair yard littered with various bulky machine tools, heavy lifting equipment and ship parts. In pride of place in the centre of the pit was the silver stylised arrowhead of a Cobra-class exploration vessel.

  Bennett gave his name and showed his pass to a guard at the gate. The guard clicked his jaw to open communications and spoke quickly, seemingly to himself. Seconds later he nodded and allowed Bennett through.

  He took a zig-zag flight of steps down into the sunken compound, inhaling a heady stench of air fouled by the mixture of test-fire ionisation and laser welding. Pre-fab offices occupied the far end of the pit, but they appeared to be empty.

  ‘Hello down there! Can I help you?’

  He looked up. High above, leaning over the gantry that surrounded the Cobra, a small figure in engineer’s overalls waved down at him.

  ‘I’m looking for Charles Mackendrick,’ Bennett called.

  ‘He won’t be long - should be back any time now. Care to come up?’

  Bennett climbed up the gantry, passing the ship’s silver-muscled hydraulic stanchions, its curved flank excoriated by a million micro-meteorite impacts. The engineer was kneeling beside the swollen cowl of a booster nacelle, peering into its depths and periodically consulting a lighted com-board.

  The engineer looked up. ‘Bennett, isn’t it? The pilot?’

  Bennett nodded, surprised by the appearance of the engineer. From below, he had been unable to determine the man’s age, but at close quarters he appeared to be in his eighties, a slight man with balding grey hair and a thin face.

  ‘Mack’s expecting you,’ the engineer said. ‘He’s told me a lot about you. Hotshot pilot, by all accounts.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Bennett began, wondering how Mackendrick knew ‘a lot’ about him.

  ‘What do you know about Dearing boosters, Bennett? Taught you mechanics and systems operations at pilot school, didn’t they?’

  Bennett wondered if this was part of the interview - to have a chief engineer grill him on basic mechanics. He entered into the spirit, knelt beside the engineer and peered into the nacelle.

  ‘They’re about the best, in my opinion, in terms of reliability and performance. The latest Mitsubishi might be faster, but I’ve heard rumours of po
or stress analysis results. I prefer Dearings.’

  ‘With Delta operating systems.’

  Bennett nodded. ‘Or the original Schulmann programs, especially for long-haul flights.’

  ‘So what do you make of this?’ The engineer thrust the com-board at Bennett. ‘There, and there . . .’ He pointed to read-outs flashing at the bottom right of the screen.

  ‘That’d suggest an operating failure in the Delta relay. It can be remedied by inserting a Manx sub-routine. Of course, you wouldn’t have this problem with a Schulmann program.’

  The engineer nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  He stood and escorted Bennett around the cat-walk encircling the ship, stopping from time to time to point out some interesting addition or design feature.

  They paused before the projecting nose-cone. Bennett peered inside at the spacious flight-deck, with wraparound consoles and gimbal couches. Hell, there was room enough in there to contain his old Viper tug, and then some.