Penumbra

by Eric Brown

  ‘What do you want?’ The question sounded more brusque than she had intended.

  He stepped past her, entering uninvited, and strode across the lounge to the window. He stood with his back to her, staring out.

  ‘How can I help you?’ Her voice faltered.

  He turned, still smiling. She was suddenly aware of her nakedness beneath the wrap, and folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘That need not concern you,’ he said.

  Rana started. She recognised the voice, the soft, cultured tones. It was the voice of Ezekiel Klien - but how was that possible?

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked again. She knew that she must have presented a frightened sight, cowering with her arms crossed protectively over her chest.

  ‘It’s a very delicate business. You see, I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.’

  Rana felt a sudden heat rise through her chest. She wanted to throw up. Something was happening here that she did not understand, and ignorance fuelled her fear.

  ‘Consider the irony. For years I have been, on and off, scouring Calcutta for you. Of course, you might have been dead, but I had a hunch ... a hunch that you were still alive—’

  ‘Klien,’ she said, before she could stop herself.

  The man smiled. ‘Very clever of you, Sita. The voice, of course.’ He gave a quick, mocking bow. ‘I am Ezekiel Klien.’

  She closed her eyes, fear flooding through her. She had known, just as soon as she said his name, that she had made a mistake. He was the crucifix killer, disguised, and he would kill her just as he had killed all his other victims.

  ‘How . . . ?’ she said, staring at his face. ‘How did you . . . ?’

  He smiled. ‘A simple capillary net,’ he said.

  ‘I . . . I didn’t know ... I didn’t think it was possible . . .’ She had heard that capillary nets were still at the prototype stage of development, still undergoing tests.

  He ignored her. ‘Thirteen years ago,’ he was saying, ‘I was a private investigator hired by your mother to find you.’

  Rana recalled the man she had seen with her mother in the restaurant, all those years ago.

  She stared at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  She told herself not to panic. There was, after all, a simple solution to the situation. She clicked her jaw, opening communications with Control. Now they would hear her every word, discern that something was amiss. She waited for the voice of the duty officer to sound in her ear.

  Klien was smiling at her, something almost playful in his expression. He smiled, and clicked his jaw in an arrogant, mocking gesture, and said, ‘You didn’t think for one second, did you, that I would let you get away with that?’

  From the breast pocket of his suit he produced a compact silver oval, the size of a cigarette case. A scrambler.

  ‘Nice try, Sita,’ he said.

  Rana had never felt more naked or vulnerable. This man, of all the people on the planet, knew her secret. He was in a position of inestimable power, and it was not knowing quite how he intended to use this power that was terrifying.

  She glanced across the room at the Chinese print, behind which was the alarm. She would make her way very casually towards it, then lean against the print, and with luck security would arrive before he killed her.

  ‘I know that you are Sita Mackendrick.’

  He moved from the window and perched on the arm of a chair, something proprietorial and arrogant in his posture. He was a metre away from the picture. There was no way she might reach it, now, without arousing his suspicion.

  He smiled at her. ‘As I said, consider the irony. For so long I have been looking for you, and last night you actually found me. Remarkable ... I could hardly believe my fortune.’

  ‘How . . .’ she began. The words, the admission of her true identity after so many years of denial, had to be forced out. ‘How did you know . . . ?’

  ‘Your mother made available a few pix of you, of course. Over the years I’ve had them updated, computer-aged. I knew who I was looking for . . . if, that is, you were still alive. It did occur to me that the people who robbed your father’s safe might have killed you, but I hoped not. I assumed there might be a ransom demand, but when none came I began to worry. Perhaps they had killed you, after all. You saw them entering your house, you could identify them, and so you had to die. But I kept up my search. The consequences were too important not to.’

  His smug expression, his assumption of superiority, was sickening.

  ‘What . . . what do you want?’ she managed.

  Klien stood, moved away from the picture on the wall and strolled around the room. Rana’s heart began a laboured pounding. This was her chance. She moved towards the Chinese print.

  Klien stared at her. ‘I want to know who they were, Sita,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ she cried.

  She reached the wall, folding her arms protectively across her chest, and leaned back. She felt the picture give beneath her shoulder blades and at the same time experienced a terrible sense of anti-climax. She prayed that the alarm would be sounding loud and clear at the local police station.

  ‘But Sita is your name, isn’t it?’ Klien paused, licked his lips. How he was enjoying this, his moment of victory after years of disappointment. ‘I want to know the identities of the people who kidnapped you.’

  She stared at him. Her one satisfaction, amid all her fear, was the knowledge that he was so wrong. She would play along with his little game.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know who they were. They took me and locked me up. I managed to escape.’

  Klien was shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t make sense, Sita. Why would they take you from the house and simply lock you up? They would either demand a ransom, which they didn’t, or kill you, which they didn’t. So . . . are you going to tell me the truth, Sita?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’

  ‘Shall I tell you what I think happened?’ he asked. ‘I think they took you, locked you up as you said, and were going to demand a ransom, but something happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘What?’

  ‘I think that, while they held you, a certain rapport developed. It often happens between kidnappers and hostages. You grew close to them, and they perhaps to you. They took you away with them, perhaps you even worked for them at, what? Thieving? Prostitution? For whatever reasons, you never returned home. Either they kept you captive for years, or you actually enjoyed the life you were leading.’ He shook his head. ‘But that is irrelevant. What matters is that you know the identity of the people who took you, and I want to know who they are.’

  He was no longer smiling, and the sudden transformation, from condescending affability to controlled but obvious rage, filled her with fear. She stared at him, shaking her head, ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  He stood, and in one fluid menacing movement slipped a hand inside his jacket and produced a laser pistol. He held it almost casually at his hip, directed at her chest.

  ‘Who were they? Where are they now? Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’

  He nodded with a show of reasonableness. ‘Very well, I’ll explain. They took something from your father’s safe, something that is very important to me. It is called a softscreen, and it contains information that I need. Now do you understand, Sita? I need to know who kidnapped you so that I can trace them and locate the softscreen. Now, are you going to tell me, or should I resort to more than mere verbal persuasion?’

  The softscreen . . . She wondered what information the softscreen might contain that was so vital to him.

  ‘Now, Sita, tell me: who were they?’

  The very fact that he wanted information from her, she realised, might prove to be her salvation. He would hardly kill her if he thought she might be able to lead him to the screen. She decided, then, to tell him the truth. She
would tell him what he wanted to know, play for time, and hope that the security team would arrive before she had finished her explanation of the screen’s whereabouts.

  ‘Who were they?’ he asked again, raising the laser.

  She imagined herself as his latest victim, one side of her face burned beyond recognition, the other scored with a bloody crucifix.

  No, she told herself. He needs me alive.

  ‘I’ve killed many people, Sita,’ Klien told her matter-of-factly. ‘I would suffer no compunction at killing you, too.’

  She wanted to call his bluff, then, tell him that if he killed her he would never know who kidnapped her. But something in his manner made her realise that this would be a mistake. He had lost his urbane charm, or arrogance, and he was close to breaking point. There was a light in his eyes that was almost maniacal.

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve got it all very wrong, Mr Klien. You see, there were no kidnappers.’ String it out, she told herself. Play for time . . .

  He barked a laugh. ‘No? Then who robbed your father’s safe? Who took the softscreen?’

  ‘I took the softscreen, Mr Klien. I ran away from home, but first opened the safe and took some money and the screen.’ She shrugged. ‘People must have thought that I was taken by whoever stole the softscreen, but that wasn’t how it happened.’

  That gave him pause to consider. He watched her, his mind ticking over.

  He nodded slowly and licked his lips. ‘Very well.’ His voice was no longer the sophisticated drawl. The words caught in his throat. He was so close, after all, to what he had sought for such a long time. ‘Very well, Sita. Now tell me, what did you do with the softscreen?’

  She smiled. ‘I kept it, of course. I lived on the streets for five years and kept it with me. It was a source of great entertainment for me and my friends. We—’

  He interrupted. ‘Where is it now, Sita?’

  She hesitated. She imagined the security team, hurrying towards the apartment. Play for time . . .

  ‘Tell me why you need it, and I’ll tell you where it is.’

  His reaction scared her. He moved forward, jabbing the gun at her. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Ah-cha, ah-cha . . .’

  She glanced through the window. Shiva! In the street below she saw an unmarked truck draw up, half a dozen plainclothes men jump out. She thought she might pass out with fear and dread.

  ‘Sita, if you don’t tell me . . .’

  ‘Ah-cha. It’s ... I sold it. I sold it to . . .’ She bit her lip, feigning concentration. She heard footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Who? Who did you sell it to, Sita?’ He stared at her, something insane in his eyes. He raised his pistol and directed it at her chest.

  She heard a movement in the doorway. The door swung back, smacking the wall. The first shot turned the window behind Klien’s head to molten, dripping slag. Rana saw a security marksman crouching in the doorway.

  Klien ducked and swung his weapon, fired instantly. The marksman screamed and fell as the laser hit him in the head.

  Rana watched with a sense of disbelief as Klien turned towards her. She could intuit his intentions from the look in his eyes. She began to plead with him, but, almost sadly, he shook his head. In the second before his finger pressed the trigger, she imagined that she saw something like pity in his eyes.

  She screamed, and Klien fired.

  The laser hit Rana in the chest and she fell back against the wall. She slid to the floor, staring at Klien in disbelief. The pain seemed to fill every cell of her body with agonising fire.

  He fired again, this time at another security officer in the doorway. He dived across the room, sending a barrage of shots through the wall. He ran to the doorway and scanned the hall, firing all the time. Rana heard another cry.

  He paused and looked back at her. His gaze fell to the hole burned in her chest. For a brief second she thought that he was about to fire again and finish her off, but instead he moved through the door and disappeared, and something in his confident dismissal of her fate frightened her even more than the thought of the coup de grâce.

  Rana began to cry. She reached up and fingered the wound in her chest. The skin between her breasts was burned and blackened, and though the pain pulsed through her body in sickening waves, worse than the pain was the thought that she was dying.

  It was this knowledge, that after such a short life, at just twenty-three, she was going to die so needlessly, that made her cry like a child.

  Rana’s vision blurred. Nascent in her thoughts, but cut short, was the satisfaction that at least Klien had failed to find the softscreen.

  * * * *

  19

  Bennett lay in the command couch and allowed the Cobra to fly itself through the upper atmosphere of Earth. He monitored the screens set into the console that surrounded him, vigilant without a co-pilot to back him up. The ship entered the upper cloud layer, the aluminium blue of the troposphere replaced suddenly by opalescent cloud whipping around the viewscreen. The Cobra hit turbulence and rocked solidly, Bennett swinging in his couch. Seconds later the ship dropped through a raft of cumulus and the desert of northern India seemed to extend forever far below.

  He got through to Control at Calcutta spaceport. ‘Ah, Bennett here. Mackendrick/Cobra/7-55.’

  A tinny voice replied in the ear-piece of his flight helmet. ‘Ah-cha, Mackendrick/Cobra. You are cleared to land. Please copy these co-ordinates . . .’

  For the next five minutes, as the Cobra roared over northern India, Bennett programmed the approach flight-path in the Cobra, then lay back and closed his eyes. His effective involvement in the process of bringing the Cobra to Earth was over.

  Twelve hours ago he had awoken for the second time from suspension and climbed from the unit, shaking off images of bloated gas giants, alien statues and militia racing across the purple plain towards him. He had showered and eaten, bringing his body slowly back to life. When the ship phased from the void he had been greeted by a distant vision of Redwood Station, the dozen industrial orbitals winking silver in the sunlight, and he had to smile to himself. It seemed a long time since he had worked there; in real time it was over eight months ago, subjectively something like a week, though to Bennett it felt like years.

  He had instructed the ship’s navigation system to program itself a return trajectory, from Earth to Penumbra, ready for indefinite inception.

  He considered Penumbra and the people he had left behind. Hopefully by now Ten Lee’s leg wound would have healed and she would be up and walking. And Mackendrick? He had seemed well when Bennett left him with the rebels, but he had an amazing ability to hide the extent of his illness. Nearly four months had elapsed, and it would be at least another four months before he returned. Mackendrick had been given just one year to live, but that had been ten or eleven months ago, now.

  He contemplated what Quineau had told Mackendrick, all those years ago. Was it possible that the Ancients had survived in an underground chamber, that they were in possession of some arcane healing lore? It sounded, he admitted to himself, like the stuff of legend. Only when he located the softscreen, and the rebels traced the underground chamber for themselves, would the truth be known.

  The ship began the long deceleration burn as it came in on an oblique trajectory towards Calcutta spaceport. In a matter of hours he would be in the city, attempting to locate the softscreen with the help of Hupcka’s receiver. Of course, the screen might be anywhere on Earth, and even if he did locate it, it might not be so easily recoverable.

  A voice sounded in his ear: ‘Mackendrick/Cobra receiving.’

  ‘Ah-cha. Landing clearance, check. Mechanical maintenance and resupply authorised by Mackendrick Foundation, check. We will ready Cobra for immediate turn-around as requested. Ah, security will need to board ship for routine inspection. Also, they will need to interview you immediately after touchdown.’

  ‘Fine by me, Control.’

  ‘Ah-cha. Safe landing, Mackendrick/Cob
ra.’

  Through the sidescreen Bennett looked down on the vast sprawling conurbation of outer Calcutta, sunlit beneath wisps of low-lying cloud. He seemed to take long minutes to fly over the city, a vast inland spread of crowded grey concrete. The Cobra banked north, tilting Bennett for a better view of the Ganges delta and the shimmering Bay of Bengal beyond.

  The spaceport came into sight, the small shapes of other craft climbing slowly into space. The ship rattled as it decelerated and dropped steeply, giving Bennett a fullscreen view of the wide tarmac apron pocked with blast-rings and stationary ships.

  The Cobra levelled out and slowed dramatically, hovering for seconds on its vertical boosters. Bennett watched the control tower and terminal building rise around the ship as it came in to land with a loud impact of stanchions, a diminuendo of engines, and then a sudden and startling silence.