Absorption (48 page)
Authors: John Meaney
Don’t think about the food.
That brought back not just memories of the village, of the shame they shared, but also a more recent event: burying the human fingers he could not bring himself to eat or destroy, his little trophies that he kept either because of or in spite of the darkness - he never knew which.
Just don’t think.
Now he faced the round sweep of the city, while below him, at the bottom of the arcing slope, rolled the turgid grey waters of the Moscow River. He took a deep breath of chill air, then made his way down to the stately bridge, and began the long walk across.
Moscow was Paris writ large, its grand boulevards laid out in a spiderweb configuration, while the intelligence services headquarters were the watchful spider, lurking off-centre in her web. It was a strong city, an impregnable city, in a country whose vastness remained unrecognized by so much of the world.
But suddenly, Dmitri was glad to be leaving.
The train station was heaving with a mass of people, thousands crushed together, refugees whose eyes were wide with the only thought a civilized person could produce:
It’s a mistake, and someone will work it out, and fix it.
It’s a mistake, and someone will work it out, and fix it.
Because the real world could not produce this crowd who were paying for the privilege of travelling in cattle-cars, their yellow cloth stars granting them the right to climb aboard, and Gavriela did not wait around to hear the platform guard’s whistle, nor the chuff of steam and piston as the engine got underway.
She stumbled back towards the city streets.
But it was behind the station that everything fell apart.
‘You’re one of them.’
‘No—’
‘And you know the penalties for not wearing the star.’
There were three of them, dressed in suits and overcoat, one with a truncheon, another with brass gleaming across his gloved knuckles, while the third was already unbuttoning his flies as they pulled her into an alleyway.
‘Might as well get some use out of it,’ he said.
‘It better not squeal.’ One of the others was pulling a cloth from his pocket. ‘Put this in your mouth, darling.’
‘I’ve something else to put in its mouth.’
‘Ach, Mannfred. All right.’
‘Who gets first dip?’
A punch exploded against her eye socket, and suddenly she was lying on her back, knees akimbo and her skirt up, hard paving beneath her. Someone’s hand hooked deeply into her face and twisted, torqueing her nose and cheekbone hard against stone, the pain immense, her head about to fracture, while strong hands tore her panties away with a distant ripping sound.
No.
There was nothing she could do to prevent what was happening.
Help me.
She yelled, but only in her mind.
Help me!
Roger pauses in the escape tunnel, his skin layered in greasy sweat, his stomach sick, needing to get away before peacekeepers investigate beneath the house, knowing that Alisha could be in danger, but the voice he hears is not hers, not Alisha’s, but another from the distant past and dreams, calling across centuries—
‘Help me!
’
’
The thoughts are of violence and this is madness. He’s eaten nothing and his world has lurched into awfulness. Call it delusion.
‘I . . . I can’t.
’
’
He drops to his knees and finally throws up.
There was pain inside her, incredible waves of sickening intrusion, and she cried out yet again.
HELP ME!
Ulfr snaps awake. Beside him, Brandr does likewise, the warhound alert as his master.
All around are snoring warriors, deep in drunken slumber, for the carousing lasted many—
‘
HELP ME!
’
HELP ME!
’
His lips pull back.
‘So kill . . .’
Man and war-hound snarl together.
And then it came, the rage.
So kill . . .
Kicking and wriggling, and then her nails were claws - a distant yell as she raked hard - and her teeth were fangs and everything was rage, the world a redness of blood-lust, and the snarls were hers as she tore and ripped, thrust and pulled, over and over like cycling pistons, tearing and hitting and ripping again and again and again.
And finally she staggered back.
Victory, by Thórr.
Away from the three torn corpses.
May Niflheim take your souls.
She pulled her ragged coat around her as she stumbled from the alley.
Ulfr looks up at the stars, and laughs.
‘
Óthinn’s blood, girl.
’
Óthinn’s blood, girl.
’
Beside him, Brandr barks.
THIRTY-SEVEN
FULGOR, 2603 AD
Roger staggered into the open.
He was at the top of a scree. Across his face was a respmask, which he had picked up inside the escape tunnel’s exit. This was the border of a hypozone - at the foot of the slope, two lozenge-shaped creatures moved by laminar flow, their flesh looping like caterpillar tracks, along the rocky ground.
His mouth, inside the mask, tasted like vomit; and he was still not sure what had happened inside the tunnel. Whatever delusions he might have, some had enough relation to reality for a peacekeeper superintendent to take seriously. He wondered whether Sunadomari was hunting Rafaella Stargonier or Dr Helsen, or both.
Mum. Dad.
They would be safe. Dad’s ship was the most powerful, amazing thing he had ever seen. So for now he could concentrate on finding Alisha; later he would think again about the meaning of his dreams.
Stones crunched beneath him, each step another fall corrected just in time, as he stumbled downslope. At the bottom, he followed the native creatures, then jogged to overtake them, keeping the pace as he entered a tall ravine, its floor sandy, and continued to the end.
Before him glowed an orange transit station.
From here he could get back to Lucis City, and transfer to anywhere on Fulgor. While following the escape tunnel, he had browsed his tu-ring’s upgrades, courtesy of Dad; he knew there was a great deal he could do to hide from surveillance.
But, as he watched a tribe of Shadow People herd slimebellies past the station, it occurred to him that there was another place he could go, and he might not even have to leave the hypozone to do it.
There was a great deal of Dad’s illegal ware that he could not use, not without many days training; but he could see how to form an anonymous query in Skein. He tapped the turing, subvocalized commands, and saw several representations, lased into his smartlenses, of the routes he might take.
One, overlaid across his vision, was a gleaming silver line that tracked along the broken ground. It resembled the path left by moving slimebellies, but it represented the ground-level option. From here to his destination, he could travel on the surface entirely within the hypozone, where the peacekeepers would not expect him to feel at home.
The transit station led to subterranean tunnels; but here up top were slickbikes for hire.
‘Fog,’ called one of the Shadow People.
‘We see it,’ a station worker answered.
That made up Roger’s mind for him.
Banks of tiger-striped fog, violet and grey, rolled silently across the landscape. Bi-coloured fog, its Turing pattern emergent from simple chemical reactions, as if nature wanted to cloak itself from SatScan.
He inched through the fog towards the slickbike stand.
Sunadomari’s flyer touched down on a blue-and-white patio of Mansion Stargonier. En route from the Blackstone house, he had immersed himself in a sea of surveillance data. There were sightings of Rafaella Stargonier dating back less than two seconds; but the images were all in Skein, all from surveillance logs he could no longer trust. The last verified sighting might have been yesterday, when Roger Blackstone saw her in reality.
Twenty-five armoured officers were already waiting in the grounds, while two specialists from Domestics Division, both top-class Luculenti, worked through Skein, sitting safely back at Peacekeeper HQ. As soon as the DD men cracked the mansion’s security, the tac team poured inside through doors and windows.
Sunadomari waited outside.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
The tac team commander, Helen Eisberg, responded in Skein, via tu-ring.
‘
Sorry, sir,
’ she said. ‘
No one openly in the rooms. Deepscan shows no one hiding inside the architecture.
’
Sorry, sir,
’ she said. ‘
No one openly in the rooms. Deepscan shows no one hiding inside the architecture.
’
Simultaneously, he talked in Skein to the DD Luculenti.
<>
Their reply took a millisecond to arrive.
<>
<>
One of the Luculenti had a sense of intellectual irony, using a symbol from the archaic Latin alphabet to comment on a Luculenta with the Latinate name of Rafaella. Sunadomari thought it puerile, remembered the origins of
that
word, then shook distracting thoughts away.
that
word, then shook distracting thoughts away.
What was clear that the woman had left yesterday and at some point simply disappeared inside Lucis City. Then:
<>
<>
Sunadomari closed the in-Skein link and sighed.
‘Lieutenant Eisberg?’
‘Sir?’
‘Leave two people in situ, and let’s find someone we can arrest. Protocol zero.’
Eisberg checked her weaponry status.
‘I take it they’re maximally dangerous, sir.’
‘They may be. Their names are Helsen and Ranulph.’ He concentrated, sending data through Skein to Eisberg, while making the arrest request to JusticePlex in Skein. ‘JP is issuing warrants now.’
NetSprites tore through Skein, questing through video data, trying to match search arguments to moving-image objects via their
heuristicEquals( )
functions: a low-level, brute force approach that could succeed where sophisticated strategies might fail.
heuristicEquals( )
functions: a low-level, brute force approach that could succeed where sophisticated strategies might fail.
Nothing.
‘Shit.’
‘Sir?’
‘When our global, ubiquitous and all-seeing surveillance actually manages to find who we’re looking for, I’ll let you know their locations. Until then, remain on stand-by.’
Helen Eisberg’s face remained almost blank.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘
Shit.
’
Shit.
’
He had let three known spies escape from Fulgor because they weren’t the particular criminals he sought. Now all the remaining suspects were gone as well. He knew less than he had two days ago.
Except that Stella Weissmann’s name had been added to the list of the dead, her corpse lying close to the remains of the Zajinet prisoner they had kept for so long - and failed to extract information from.
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