Chasing the Dragon (17 page)

"Ghost hoar," Lila said, careful not to touch any. The sight of it
made her uneasy, and with a shiver she remembered the bitter cold of
the Hunter ship, its bodies, its dreadful mess. Although she didn't
want to she made herself reach out and collect a piece of it on her
finger. She brought it closer to her eye and looked inside the crystal,
using all the magnification and sensitivity she could.

Abruptly she was in darkness. The crack and groan of disintegrating
metal framework gave way to a scream of distressed steel over which
she could just hear desperate shouting.

"Rising, rising! We have to abort! She's cracking up!"

"Hold it one more minute, for fuck's sake! I nearly got it! Just one
more-

Lila knew that voice. It was gritty, awful, full of drive. It was Calliope Jones, the Ghost Hunter.

Then there was a chaos made up of the dying ship, human voices,
elf voices, demon voices. And then there was silence.

The crystal melted and ran down her hand. She straightened up, rubbing her fingers together and feeling the water. It was hard, limey, full
of calcium salts, the kind of water that dripped through caverns measureless to man and formed stalactites in the shape of swords. But it was
new water, and the memories its crystal had briefly retained were new too: she would have bet her house on it. The idea made her smile,
almost.

"Ma'am?"

"Jones was here." Lila looked around again. Malachi didn't have
too many possessions, so the mess was not as obscuring as it might
have been, despite the violence that had gone into creating it. Again
the heater caught her attention. "Something weird about this."

"Looking for something," Bentley suggested. "And maybe with a
grudge."

There wasn't a thing unturned in the whole place.

"Doesn't look like she found it," Lila said, comparing figures with
Bentley about the odds of finding something in the very last place
looked, and then realising she was dealing with faery things so perhaps
it was always in the last place one looked. "I guess we'll have to wait
until he gets back."

"It's getting colder in here," Bentley said.

Lila picked up the pouches and some of the beers and put them
back in the icebox, shutting the door. Two beers she kept, uncapped
them, and handed one to the android, clinking them together as she
passed it across. "Cheers."

"I don't drink on duty."

"Drink it or I'll fire you."

They both drank, Bentley after more than a second's hesitation,
which rankled with Lila slightly. The faery ale was strong, cold, almost
numbing. Lila's left side shivered. She dropped her bottle in the debris
and turned, bending down and leafing through trash until the gleam
of highly polished brass caught her attention, or more like the dress's
attention. The fabric hissed, and on her sleeves the jacquard dragons
turned their heads towards the object.

She didn't touch it, instead cleared things from around it. She and
Bentley stared at it.

"It's a sextant," Bentley said after a beat.

"If you don't mind the arc being out of whack," Lila added. The
instrument did look a lot like an ordinary navigational sextant, but it
had three more mirrors, a lens and two bizarrely curved arcs, instead of
a single true one. A fine patina of frost was beginning to form on its
surfaces. Lila voiced the obvious, "Why is it getting colder?"

"We need a magical dampener," Bentley said, as if this was something every office had, like a fire extinguisher. "There must be one in
here somewhere." She began to poke about rapidly among the clutter.

"A what?"

"It was after your time," the android said, her voice muffled as she
went behind the desk and started lifting things. "When we were able
to learn from the Signal we developed a set of antimagical tools.
Dampeners are standard issue in the agency now. Weak ones, that is,
but I'd have thought an agent like Malachi would have the best....
Ah, here it is...." She straightened up. She was holding something
that looked like a short black baton, studded at one end with metals of
different colours. She pressed something and it beeped. "Batteries are
still good. Should be enough."

Lila watched with surprise and some envy as the grey, plastic figure
moved up to the sextant, pointed the baton and pressed some more
things. There was a beep. "Tuned now, very difficult ranges ..." and
another beep. Then a kind of shiver in the air. Lila recognised it from
the first moments she had been attacked by the rogues. They had used
it on Teazle and nearly killed him.

The tendrils of crystal forming on the sextant stopped and then
began rapidly to melt.

"Can I see that?" Lila held out her hand.

Bentley passed her the dampener. "All aetheric activity relies on frequency modulations of matter at the superstring level. This instrument
matches waveforms and feeds back the mirror image, cancelling the
action. Of course, it's no good if you have to keep retuning a lot, if you
have multiple attackers, or if you are in a wide area of effect. Too slow and too weak. There are bigger ones. But it is some protection against the initial magical attacks we might face. We have to keep this one tuned to
that object or it could revert any time. Or if it's a cipher, then the user
could figure out what we're doing and start a different approach. It will
detect changes every few seconds, though again that's kinda slow."

Lila handled the baton carefully, testing, analysing, taking copies
of its schematics. There was a familiarity about its construction. She
handed it back to Bentley, confident that she could reproduce one if
necessary. "How much else have I missed?"

"You'll catch up," Bentley said, and for the first time Lila saw her
face change its perfectly smoothed bland expression into the semblance of a smile.

Lila looked back at the sextant. "Now what? We don't even know
what that is. Except that if Jones was looking for it she's the worst
finder in the history of finding, which I doubt very much." She sat
back on her haunches. "We should wait for Mal. What do we do with
it until then? Just leave it here?" She had a clue who this belonged to,
but she didn't want to say. Maybe Mal's superstitions were rubbing off
on her. She doubted Bentley was up enough on the day's events to
piece it together, but the sextant had to be related to the Fleet, Jones
was deep into the Fleet, her own office was temporarily a last resting
place for some of the Fleet, and Mal was haunted by the damn Fleet:
it didn't take a genius to put all that together and get a set of vitally
important, connected yet meaningless facts.

Maybe, she thought, maybe if I put all the magical things together
in a pile and sneak out very, very quietly it will all go away.

She straightened up. "Stay here and keep an eye on it. If I don't
come back in an hour get someone to relieve you. Call me as soon as
Mal shows up."

"Yes, ma'am."

In the offices the day staff were packing their things and
exchanging work with the night shift. The cleaners were just getting a move-on. It was busy, almost hectic. Lila went back to her office and
installed some new warning tape across the door, as much for a telltale
as a deterrent; then she took the long route to the armory, just to look
at things, at people, to be with them a few minutes longer.

Inside the armory she met a pleasant young man who was glad to
show her the full range of magical suppressant items. He demonstrated
how they worked, powered them up, and let her take them into a safe
room for testing.

She'd never been in a safe room before. In her day there was the
range, where you shot things in various ways, and that was all. Now
she was in a peculiar version of the same thing, standing on a platform
that allowed her to do close work, water tests or range tests using an
array of shields and modifiers that she had to spend ten minutes
learning before she could do the first little thing and check whether or
not the personal-sized baton was able to do anything with the pen.

The trouble was, she didn't know how the pen worked. Not
exactly. She put the baton in a clamp and set it to Auto as she'd been
shown, putting herself in the attacker's position. How did you attack
with a pen? Write a nasty letter? She tried to flourish it, to force it to
change into the sword, but it did not. After a few more attempts she
gave up and uncapped it instead, holding the golden nib close to the
tip of the baton. A big screen readout on the wall behind it displayed
the results in glowing colours. "Threat not present."

She found the negative mildly amusing. Why didn't it just say, "Safe"?

But the pen was not safe. Not really. She wanted the baton to work,
so that she could find out exactly how unsafe it was ... safely. She
wanted the baton not to work, so that she could feel that much more
protected by the dread power of the pen. This stalemate thing was no
good at all.

Pens write, she reasoned, so she must write something. Teazle had
said this pen was the weapon of intent, and of course there was that
saying about "mightier than the sword" to bear in mind. If only she were an elf who had spent a lifetime choosing the right words. But she was
only a human, and right words had come to her rarely, and never timely.

Besides that, there was no paper. In the old days there had been
quite a lot of paper, but now there was none, she'd found, except toilet
paper and various kinds of absorbent cloth made from wood pulp.
Speak-to-text was popular, using any household device, and the most
cheap and nasty personal organisers had the ability to project readable
text on any surface; so now she was stuck unless she wanted to vandalise
the table. She considered it, sure the pen would be able, but then she
thought she would just try writing it where she wanted it....

Carefully, as if using a sparkler slowly, she wrote her challenge to
the baton in the air in front of it. The lines ran thick, black and true,
as lightless as the pits of eternity. Try me.

The baton exploded. Shrapnel rang and whined around the room
as she ducked and wrapped her arms around her head. But she was
smiling, because there had been a moment when she felt the pen move
in her fingers, as if it was surprised, and a moment when the baton had
flashed up a signal that said Evasive Action Required.

Gradually she undid herself and got up and found she had only
minor cuts. The words that had cut into the air itself were gone. For a
few minutes she gathered up the broken bits of the dampener, using
the time to contemplate a couple of things.

The first thing was that she wasn't about to test the pen with
bigger hardware-she doubted there would be a difference and she
was feeling something like smug contempt radiating from the thing
as it lay capped in her hand. How a pen could emanate an emotion was
beyond her, but its energy, like the energy of the dress, was powerful
and remorseless. She could no more have mistaken the feeling than if
Max had just beaten her at cards, again.

The second thing was that Sarah Bentley must be at least seventy
years old. In generational terms that made her Lila's age, but in real
terms it made her akin to Lila's grandmother, and Lila had been offhanded and arrogant with her. Bentley looked ageless, but certainly
not old. The grey plastic that had replaced her skin was utterly smooth
and she moved with normal youthful vigour. And yet, the question
that seeped on and on through Lila's tired brain wormed forwards: the
reason she kept thinking of Bentley as an android was the flatness of
her emotion as well as the blankness of what remained of her expression. It was a human fancy that machines must be emotionless, because
they had things that were very like minds if you liked the metaphor of
hardware and software, brain running mind, but clearly no hearts or
anything like flesh with all its chemical foibles. They were cold,
metallic, logical, calculating. But all these features were simply literally true of their components. It was the fancy to read a poetic extension into it and attribute the same intents to machines as you would to
humans with those features in their makeup. By rule of poetry
machines were psychopathic, at best indifferent, as puppets were
wooden and dolls plastic and teddy bears cuddly and soft, fluffyheaded, loving. The material determined the spirit. Was it so? Was it
more than human creation and myth?