Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Kendrick noticed Draeger speaking quietly into his databand. What followed happened so fast that Kendrick was still remembering lost fragments of it over the next several hours.

  While he’d been looking towards Draeger Candice had darted towards him before he could get up again. Grabbing his head, she dug her thumbs and fingers into his eyes.

  Kendrick screamed and struggled as she wrapped him in a deadly embrace, pinning his arms to his sides and pressing him down with a knee in his back. He squirmed desperately, but she held him in a vice-like grip. Panic drove him to lash backwards with his foot.

  The kick caught her on one shin, and she lost her footing, her grip loosening. Kendrick pulled himself free and stumbled towards the window just as Draeger’s gunmen crashed into the room, weapons drawn. One took aim and Kendrick ducked to the side, hitting the ground rolling once more as the glass behind him exploded outwards.

  Kendrick yanked himself up again, waiting for the bullets, catching a glimpse through the shattered window of the street several storeys below.

  Panicking, he turned, desperate for some escape route that he knew wasn’t there. Just then, Candice launched herself at him again with renewed fury. The force of impact drove him backwards against a weakened pane that had not yet shattered. In that same instant, which seemed to last for ever, Kendrick felt the glass give way. Sky and concrete tumbled past his vision.

  Free fall was followed by a sudden, jarring impact like nothing he had ever imagined, as if some giant had gone walking across the Earth and caught him under its heel. In that moment he felt something beyond pain.

  Several seconds passed before Kendrick realized that he was still alive. But the world felt remote and distant, like a cinematic projection on the inside of his skull.

  An instant later he snapped to, re-emerging into a universe of noise and confusion. The streets of Edinburgh revolved around him in a drunken whirl. He managed to sit up, his mouth full of blood. He coughed and spat, and then looked down.

  Kendrick and Candice had landed together on the roof of a parked car, their joint impact bending its roof badly out of shape. The air around them was filled with the cacophony of its alarm.

  I should be dead, he realized. But Kendrick was a Labrat, which had made just enough difference.

  He’d obviously landed on top of Candice, who had softened his landing. Her back was broken and her neck was twisted at a sickening angle. He heaved himself off the wreckage, collapsing into a heap at the roadside.

  Already the initial shock was wearing off. Kendrick glanced up shakily at the smashed window of the hotel suite. It looked a very long way up. Cars had screeched to a halt all around him, as their computer brains registered an accident of some kind.

  He lurched to his feet like a drunkard, distantly aware of people nearby standing and watching him, their expressions stunned and disbelieving.

  One man came towards him but Kendrick waved him away. Then a woman tried to take his arm. He was scarcely aware that she was advising him to remain still before he injured himself any further.

  He pushed her away, but not too roughly, assuring her that he felt all right. Somehow he managed to make his way to the other side of the road, then slowly worked his way down the street and away from the Arlington’s entrance.

  Limping badly at first, after thirty seconds or so he began to pick up speed. Soon he was startled to realize that he was already a couple of blocks from the hotel.

  Somewhere in the distance he heard sirens. A lot of people must have seen him. They would be able to describe him and ultimately identify him.

  To his own amazement, Kendrick managed to start running.

  Kendrick waited until it was dark again, nursing coffee after coffee in the back of a small café buried in an ancient, twisting lane near Cockburn Street. Freezing rain sleeted down outside and the shoulders of passers-by beyond the glass were bowed under the arctic wind blowing westwards. Every now and then he tapped through an eepsheet that had been abandoned at the table he’d taken, one near the back amid plenty of shadows. He used it to scan science sites and article databases concerning zero-point energy, noting that a lot of the information provided led back to research programmes instigated by Draeger’s various subsidiary companies.

  To Kendrick’s considerable surprise nothing had yet appeared about the recent incident at the hotel. He briefly toyed with the idea that Draeger had the means to suppress news reports, then wondered when he’d become so paranoid.

  It felt appropriate to be waiting there as lightning flickered beyond the rooftops, to be waiting for the storm to approach and swallow the city in its fury. Eventually the café had to close, and then Kendrick wandered the darkened streets, collar up, head down. Icy sleet turned the skin of his face red with cold.

  Now he had more than enough time to think. He needed to find a way out of the city. But, whatever happened, he owed it to Caroline to find her.

  Kendrick pulled out his wand for the thousandth time. Even if nothing had yet appeared on the grid about the incident at the Arlington Hotel, that didn’t mean people weren’t out looking for him. And Edinburgh wasn’t that big a city.

  It was possible that someone had tapped his wand’s grid address, in which case they’d know how to find him as soon as he used it. But he needed to speak to Todd and he’d started heading for the Saint a couple of times before turning back. Draeger would know to look for him there.

  The wand chose that moment to inform him that he had an incoming call from Todd. Kendrick watched the icon flash for a moment on the instrument’s screen. Then he hit receive, and put the wand to his ear.

  “Before you say anything, Kendrick, this line is encrypted. Took me ages to get it sorted out. I heard something about what happened. Unless that was somebody else who fell out of a third- or fourth-floor hotel window and just walked away.”

  “So we’re safe on this line? I thought maybe—”

  “Just don’t tell me where you are in case I’m wrong about the encryption and someone can hear us. If anyone out there has good enough software they can probably break the q-crypt code in a couple of minutes. So I won’t be long.” A pause. “I did as you asked.”

  Kendrick forced himself to relax, to grip the wand less desperately. “You’ve found Hardenbrooke?”

  “Sure. I’m uploading Hardenbrooke’s most recent co-ords to you now. By the looks of things, he’s on his way to New York. But, a word of warning, I found him the same way he’s most likely to find you.”

  “That’s fine to know, Todd, but I’m in a hurry here.”

  “Sure, sorry Ken. Once you’ve checked out the stuff I’m sending, my best advice is to ditch the wand. If Hardenbrooke had ditched his I’d never have been able to track him so easily.”

  “Thanks, Todd. I owe you big time.”

  Kendrick closed the connection and switched the screen to review Todd’s location data. He realized that he hadn’t yet told Todd about Malky – and he couldn’t make up his mind whether this was a good or a bad thing.

  His wand informed him that Hardenbrooke was somewhere over the Atlantic, heading west – towards America. Numbers scrolled in a corner of the screen, and Kendrick was pleased to see that Todd’s coordinates constantly updated themselves in real-time.

  And what if Hardenbrooke does have Caroline? he asked himself. Does she run straight into your arms if you manage to rescue her? Almost certainly not. Draeger had told him earlier that Los Muertos were behind Caroline’s abduction – which meant there was a good chance that Hardenbrooke had been involved. So if he could find Hardenbrooke, then he could find Caroline.

  A black wave of depression began to settle over Kendrick’s thoughts. Admit it, this is all because of Robert. You killed her brother, and now you figure this is your chance to make up for it.

  Kendrick thought back to what Buddy had told him, and about what he’d managed to find out while he’d searched the grid for information about zero-point energy. He couldn’t even imagine,
remembering the few words he’d managed to digest, the sheer destructive horror that such knowledge could be turned to.

  Now, it seemed, the lure of infinite energy was leading everyone towards the Archimedes.

  Exact date unknown: 2088

  The Maze

  “I know where we are. I swear, I know where this is.”

  Vernon Lee’s face was visible only as a pale, pleading shadow in the terrible darkness of the lower levels. He’d been one of only three to survive Ward Nine.

  They had gathered together in huddled groups ever since they had found themselves locked away in freezing dark corridors down in the depths of the Earth. Some, like Kendrick, could see those gathered around them as pale, shadowy outlines. Others whose bio-augmentations had not taken such firm hold on their bodies were still lost in the blackness, clinging quite literally to each other in the vast echoing spaces.

  There was no evidence that food or water would ever be forthcoming and, after almost forty-eight hours, people were beginning to suffer. For himself, Kendrick felt parched, dry and cold. His stomach longed even for the thin gruel that he had known back in the Ward.

  Kendrick pressed his hands against the cold metal of the shield door and felt something humming under the hard surface – the bright subliminal presence of electricity flowing through circuits. But it seemed faint, as if far away.

  “Okay.” Kendrick looked over his shoulder at Lee. “So where are we?”

  He could just make out Buddy, standing to one side, listening.

  “Used to work for a company did contract military work,” Lee explained. “We built stuff for them, but only bits of it.”

  Buddy shifted in the dark. “I don’t get it.”

  “What it is, if someone in the military wants something built top secret, they still have to bring in civilians a lot of the time. They screen you for all kinds of shit, you sign release forms, and they do everything but stick a torch up your ass and take a look.” Lee shrugged. “Sometimes that too. But you never see the whole thing – only part of it. Only a few people outside the military ever get to see the project as a whole. Usually whoever’s running the operation from the top.”

  “Just a minute,” said Kendrick. “Are you saying you helped build this place?”

  “Yes!” said Lee excitedly. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. These doors are designed to withstand nuclear blasts,” he explained, placing a hand against the same cold metal.

  A wall of steel cut across the corridor, completely blocking their access to the upper levels. They were abandoned in what appeared to be literally miles of lightless passageway, but half a dozen huge steel doors blocked any way out for them. “I helped design these things,” Lee continued. “I even remember how the corridors are laid out.”

  Buddy spoke, his voice low and intense. “Can you get us out of here, then?”

  Lee shook his head. “No, I can’t. All I’m saying is, I know where we are, but that’s it. All this stuff – the doors, I mean – the controls are centralized. The only way out would be finding some way of interfering with the electronics, but there’s no way to access the mechanisms.”

  “So what’s above us?” asked Buddy. “We’re in South America, right? You must know that, at least.”

  “Venezuela,” Lee said decisively. Then he grinned ruefully. “Shit, looks like I’m going to jail for breaking my oath of secrecy. Well, fuck.”

  Kendrick shook his head. “I had no idea.”

  “What does it matter?”

  Kendrick turned at the sound of McCowan’s voice. Peter emerged out of the gloom, his words sounding harsh in the freezing air. “We’re screwed, wherever we are. Knowing exactly where isn’t going to make any difference. There’ve been rumours for, Christ, years, about US control south of Mexico.”

  “It’s true,” said Lee. “There’s no real government up above there. It’s a lawless place now, and the gene-rots hit here even before they hit the States.”

  Kendrick pulled his hands away from the metal, feeling defeated and depressed. “Which leads me to wonder when they actually built this place,” he muttered. “It must have taken a long time, considering the size of it. And in total secrecy, too.”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Lee. “I’m talking twenty years ago. I was just a boy, really.” He shook his head. “Place hasn’t been well maintained.”

  “You could house an army down here,” said McCowan. “The Wards could have been originally intended for treating wounded soldiers.”

  “Out here, outside the US, they could get away with anything so long as they were sure nobody was watching,” Buddy spat, his voice bitter and angry.

  Telling the time, or even the day, was impossible but Kendrick estimated that they’d been trapped in the darkness for about three days when the voices came.

  In the meantime, there had been at least a dozen deaths – some from a lack of medical treatment necessary to keep the weaker Labrats alive, but most of them suicides.

  One had hanged herself, knotting one leg of her trousers around her neck after first tying the other end to an overhead pipe. She had stood on the body of her dead lover to reach up to the pipe before pulling her legs up at the knees and somehow, horribly, holding them there until she passed out. As she slumped unconscious, her improvised noose and the force of gravity completed the process of strangulation.

  Her lover – they never found out either of their names – had died within hours of arriving in the lower levels from the sudden and explosive growth of his augmentations.

  There were other incidents, equally as gruesome and equally depressing.

  And then there were the other stories.

  One told of the figure glowing with light, lightning spitting from its fingertips as it ran laughing through the most distant corridors, somehow passing through the great shield doors that penned the prisoners in as if it could walk through walls. To Kendrick this meant only that people were losing their sanity as starvation and sensory deprivation pushed them to the brink.

  But then the voices came.

  Kendrick had seen speakers slung up high along the corridors at irregular intervals. One day they started crackling with the sound of a familiar voice.

  Sieracki?

  Kendrick listened with a dawning sense of horror. The worst was yet to come.

  “Enter the corridor marked Level 9, South-West,” Sieracki ordered them. “The door will open. There is food there, but only for those who survive.” Kendrick listened to the shouts of dismay around him in the darkness. “You will have to fight for the right to live. We wish now to test the survival skills of subjects from our different experimental groups.”

  “I get it.” Kendrick turned to McCowan, who stood behind his shoulder. There was a sadness in his voice. “They never intended any of us to get out of here alive.”

  “It’s fucking insane!” Buddy shouted. “I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No,” said Kendrick. “It makes perfect sense. They made us what we are, and they aren’t going to set us loose. Instead of just killing us themselves, they throw us in a hole in the ground and leave us to kill each other. That way they get rid of us, but they also figure out which experimental group has produced the best results. The ones who can survive, that is.”

  “Maybe it makes sense,” McCowan agreed. “But it doesn’t mean that’s how it’s going to work out. People don’t need to fight each other when they know they’re going to die anyway.”

  “I don’t know.” Kendrick shook his head. “If you’ve been hungry and desperate long enough, I’m not sure what any of us would do. Long as people think there’s even the slimmest chance, the faintest hope, they’ll fight tooth and claw if given the chance.”

  “I won’t,” said Buddy decisively. “I can refuse.”

  “You can refuse.” Kendrick nodded wearily, thinking: And that way you’ll die. And the ones who won’t refuse will fight, and Sieracki still gets what he wants.

  22 October 209
6

  Edinburgh

  Getting out of the country turned out to be less of a problem than Kendrick had initially suspected. Not long after his conversation with Todd he got another call from Buddy. Kendrick filled him in.

  “I’m on my way to the States myself. Listen, head for California, okay? That’s where we’re meeting,” said Buddy.

  “I need to find Caroline first, Buddy.”

  “But do you even have any idea where they might have taken her?”

  “New York. I know Hardenbrooke is on his way there, and may be he’s got Caroline with him. It’s not like I have any other options.”

  “You know this has to be a trap, right?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Kendrick could hear Buddy sigh on the other end of the line. “I guess I’d do the same. Good luck, but maybe you should tie your wand into mine.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. Every time I use this thing it gives someone a chance to track me down over the grid.”

  “So what? They can probably find you anyway. This way at least your friends will know where you are, right?”

  Kendrick thought about it. “Yeah, okay then. Listen, about the . . . this whole thing with the Archimedes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How long before you go there?”

  “Three days, Kendrick. Three days. Remember that.”

  Kendrick closed the connection and thought for a moment. Then he called up Roy Whitman’s grid address.

  “Long time, no hear,” Roy chuckled when he realized who he was talking to. “What’s it been, a couple of years? Anything from Buddy recently? Haven’t heard from him in a good long while myself.”

  “Buddy’s doing fine, Roy. Listen, I need a favour.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Roy. “What kind of favour?”

  “A special kind of favour.”

  “Right, hang on a minute.”

  The sound of Roy’s breathing disappeared abruptly for a few seconds. “Okay, we’re on a secure line now,” he said when he returned. “Can you talk freely where you are?”