The Hunting (20 page)

‘I can’t believe how awake Whistler is.’

Three brown-bagging girls in micro-skirts tottered by laughing and giggling. Genie stared at their high heels. How did anyone learn to walk in those? In Spurlake someone would probably arrest them for indecency.

‘It’s a party town,’ Renée announced grinning.

‘Any idea where to go?’

‘Find me a latté, I need coffee,’ Renée declared.

‘We have to find Marshall,’ Genie told her.

Renée pulled a face. ‘After coffee.’ She looked across a square. ‘We could go to Merlin’s. I heard it’s wild at night. We have to breakfast at Rendezvous on Blackcomb. Oh yeah, we got to ride on the Peak 2 Peak – eleven minutes between the peaks and great views.’

Genie looked at Renée, amazed. ‘We’re not skiing. Besides there’s no snow. You’ve never been here before, girl, how can you know anything about Whistler?’

Renée looked at Genie with a big broad smile. ‘You think I didn’t read online magazines whilst I was in the Fortress? I could read anything I wanted. I got it all planned. Believe me, lunch at the Roundhouse is a must. All cool.’

‘Everything’s going to need money,’ Rian said, trying to bring her down to earth. ‘We’re fugitives, remember? Got to keep a low profile. Guard the cash. Where are we headed? I mean, do you know where we’re supposed to meet Marshall?’

‘We have to head towards the All Seasons Hotel,’ Genie explained.

‘You’re kidding,’ Renée said in surprise. She was impressed. ‘It’s like the most expensive hotel in North America or something.’

Rian pointed to a huge building dominating the skyline at the end of the road where it met Blackcomb Way. ‘You sure?’

Genie nodded.

‘They’ll never let us in. Not with a dog,’ Renée pointed out.

Genie laughed. ‘Not going
into
the hotel, dummy. We’re going under it.’

‘Radspan is under the hotel?’

‘Fourteen levels down.’

Rian shook his head, amused. ‘Right, how do you do that? You can’t just come in and dig a hole – people would notice.’

Genie suddenly realized something she had mentally filed away. ‘Strindberg owns it. He owns tons of land here. The photos in the gallery. He was standing outside this hotel.’

‘Can’t we just go get a burger at Splitz before we go underground?’ Renée protested.

Genie was about to consent when suddenly Moucher barked and took off along the road.

‘Mouch!’ Genie shouted.

‘MOUCH!’ they all shouted, giving chase.

The dog could run real fast when excited. He ran towards Blackcomb Way as a truck was coming up the road.

Genie had been thinking that it looked remarkably like Marshall’s old truck just as Moucher caught up with it at the lights. A door opened and the dog just hopped in.

Genie and the others stopped dead, the issue of Moucher’s disloyalty aside. It did occur to her that it might be a trap. If anyone knew they were coming, if they got hold of Marshall’s truck.

The truck pulled over. Two vehicles pulled past it, honking their horns. Genie saw a pair of man’s legs awkwardly swing out and felt very relieved.

‘You should teach this dog discipline,’ Marshall said as they approached. He was grinning. ‘He’s lost weight.’

‘We’ve
all
lost weight,’ Genie replied. ‘You too.’

Marshall hugged her, looking at Rian and Renée. ‘Good to see you, Rian, and I guess you must be Renée.’

‘Hi.’ She flashed him a broad smile.

‘Get in. Two inside, one in the back.’

‘We going to the All Seasons?’ Genie asked him as he broke away. He looked surprised at her question.

‘You think I’m made of money? Got us a room at a cheap motel back some way from here. Come on. We have things to discuss.’

‘Is there anywhere to eat there?’ Renée asked.

Marshall smiled. ‘I don’t want you kids visible. We’ll order pizza.’ He looked at Genie again with a question on his face. ‘That a wig?’

‘Yeah. Hair doesn’t grow that fast.’

‘Well, either way, this is good timing. But I want you off the streets. Miller got word there is a huge search on for you guys now. Strindberg is claiming you tried to kill him.’

Genie laughed. ‘We what?’

‘You broke into his place and threatened him. Serious charges.’

‘Never even met him,’ Renée protested.

‘Well, he’s got powerful friends and let’s say we concentrate on staying invisible for a while.’

They drove to the motel and parked right outside the room on the ground floor.

Moucher was a picture of happiness itself and Marshall, for a guy who claimed he didn’t care for the dog, was making quite a fuss over him. Genie watched and felt a little guilty she had taken him away from him and put the dog through so much.

Marshall ordered pizza whilst Renée and Genie took showers and Rian filled him in on all their travels. Marshall listened intently with growing amazement and admiration that they hadn’t been caught.

More than half the pizza had gone before they had even described delivering Ferry’s letter to the unfortunate Betty Juniper. And Genie had only gotten as far as the hunters when Rian got back from his shower. She had discarded her disguise and was relieved; the wig was a source of irritation all the time.

By one a.m. they got as far as Strindberg’s mansion, the shock of seeing her picture in the gallery and Genie meeting up with Cary and Denis. Marshall was picking up on the subtext however and raised his hands.

‘So let me get this right. You don’t want me use Radspan. I’m not sure I want to use Radspan, so that’s it? We do nothing?’

Genie slumped. She’d been hoping Marshall would have answers but all they’d done so far is to prove to each other that it was going to be impossible to help the others.

‘I want to help them, but I really don’t know how,’ Genie explained.

Marshall drank some green tea he’d brought with him and thought hard about the situation. Moucher lay with his back paws on Genie and front on Marshall, his affections clearly divided.

‘What about Level Fourteen? You say you were there?’ Marshall asked her, trying to get things clear in his head.

Genie sighed. ‘It was freezing.’

‘She nearly froze to death,’ Renée interjected. ‘She had actual frost on her skin, can you believe that?’

‘Frost?’

‘It was minus twenty, at least,’ Genie remarked. ‘There was frost covering the computers and the map of Radspan, I remember brushing it aside.’ Genie looked at her hand as if the frost was still there.

‘What did you learn?’ Marshall asked.

‘Everything. Dr Milan made videos of all his teleport tests. They’re on the computer hard-drives. The whole place looks like he shut the door and never went back. Cary was with me.’

Marshall nodded. ‘He recorded his tests?’

Genie nodded. ‘Four thousand five hundred. That’s when Strindberg shut it down.’

‘Four thousand five hundred,’ Marshall exclaimed, his eyebrows shooting up. ‘Wow. He was a very determined guy, very determined.’

‘Were you working on the same thing?’ Rian asked him.

Marshall nodded. ‘Same idea, but we were coming at it from a different theory with different techniques. To be honest, he was never going to beat the odds. His system was too slow. He never had enough speed or memory. It was never going to work, no matter what he added to it. There’s a corollary that the more wires and power you add to a system, the slower it gets – and he was never going to beat the wiring bottlenecks. We know that, but he didn’t know, I guess. He was desperate not to have his funding cut off.’

Renée pulled a face. ‘All those animals that lost their lives for nothing. It was never going to work?’

Marshall shook his head. ‘Never. He could make things disappear, but he hadn’t a hope in hell in transmitting all that DNA and reassembling it in the right order. It was way too ambitious considering his equipment.

‘When the Fortress transmitted you guys, for example, bits of your DNA would have been on at least thirty – or even fifty – thousand servers at any one time and the clever bit was the stability programme that remembers where it all is and what order it is supposed to be in. That’s what Synchro does. Holds all that information until it is ready to spit it out and re-assemble. He didn’t have that logic theorem built into Radspan. He was like black-and-white TV; it’s good, but it isn’t in colour.’

Genie frowned. ‘But we didn’t arrive in Synchro when we transmitted. So what does that prove?’

Marshall shrugged. ‘That they still don’t know what they are doing, I’m afraid.’

‘So maybe Dr Milan’s mice and dogs went someplace too?’

Marshall conceded that. ‘But would they be alive?’

‘There must be tons of dog bones someplace,’ Genie said with real sadness.

‘I believe he bred the dogs specifically.’

Genie was appalled. ‘He teleported puppies?’

‘He should have come over to our programme; he was offered, but he refused. I remember meeting with him. He looked like your perfect mad scientist – staring eyes. You could tell he was obsessed.’

‘I still don’t get how they built it under a hotel?’ Rian muttered.

Marshall yawned and stretched. ‘Where better to hide something secret? It was built to help fund Radspan, I guess, but when Strindberg bought in to the holding company he was campaigning to have it closed right from the get-go. I think he had a falling out with Dr Milan.

‘They were all based here in Whistler. I was in Spurlake, as you know. We were on Level Six, working on the stability programme. Keeping molecules stable in transmission is hard science. No one liked how much money we were going through either. This is all frontier stuff and sometimes you get things wrong. Radspan was doomed from the outset, only no one could see that at the time. But that’s not why I’m here now.’

Genie felt tired. She could barely keep her eyes open now.

‘So why are you here?’

Marshall looked at her. ‘Because I think I may have thought of a way you can help your friends. You won’t like it, but what with them all being in comas, there isn’t much of a choice in the matter.’

‘You know why they all collapsed?’ Rian asked.

Marshall nodded. ‘Extreme Mosquito attack most likely shut down their brainwaves. Literally turned them off. It’s designed to incapacitate. Apparently, according to my contact, it’s something the defence division of Fortransco was working on for the US Government. I met up with someone from Level Six who is still working on it and he said they cranked it up too high and burned out the neurones. Those kids aren’t going to come back from that.’

‘But Genie has been speaking with them,’ Rian protested.

‘Genie has been communicating with Cary because he’s possibly found a neural pathway back to his DNA stored on the Fortress servers. That’s as good an explanation as I can come up with. I don’t pretend to understand half of what Genie is capable of, I just respect it. As a scientist, I’m kind of jealous too.’

Genie looked up at Marshall her face set, demanding honesty.

‘So you think they’re all going to die.’

Marshall shrugged. ‘Yeah. I do. I heard one, maybe two died already. I’m sorry. Even if you could get into the Fortress and rescue them, you’ll never wake them, Genie. It’s my honest opinion. They are almost certainly dead or going to die, and soon. The life-support system is just for testing purposes.’

Genie felt hot tears rolling down her cheeks.

Renée felt for Genie, but she was angry. ‘They could have done the same to us.’

‘That was what they were intending. Still intending, I might add.’

‘So if we can’t save them, if they’re going to die, why are we here, Marshall?’ Rian asked. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I have a proposal. As I said, you aren’t going to like it. It’s going to sound completely insane, but then, everything in this game is completely crazy.’

‘What?’ Genie asked.

‘You want to sleep first? You’re barely conscious.’

‘Are you stupid? I need to know now. We all do.’

Renée was tired as well, but she couldn’t just go to sleep without knowing. Rian looked at Genie and she could tell he agreed.

Marshall rubbed Moucher’s flanks and looked away for a moment as he tried to assemble his thoughts.

‘This project didn’t set out to produce monsters. It just made monsters out of people. We wanted to save the world. One day in the future they’ll think we were stupid burning all that fossil fuel to keep warm and so we can all travel by car or SUV someplace. There really is no excuse for owning a Ferrari, but we’d all secretly want one if we could. Some people say that if we hadn’t invented the jet engine, global warming may not have happened. If we hadn’t genetically modified food we wouldn’t be now able to feed seven billion people on this planet. But we did and you could argue we are now paying a big price for it. The world may not be able to sustain us much longer. Some of us, of course, but seven, eight or nine, or even ten billion people? I severely doubt it.

‘When I left university I wanted to save the world from itself. Teleportation was a dream, that’s all. A small dream shared by a few people. We thought that if we could teleport people to wherever they wanted to go, we’d save the planet. No more airports, no more jet trails, tourism right down to the individual level.’

Marshall smiled, checking to see if they were listening.

‘Of course, things never quite work out that way, do they? To get funds for research it was necessary to go to people like Strindberg. I think he was in the ice-cream business one time. How he got control of everything over the years is worth a study on its own. He made a fortune in ninety-eight in the first dotcom boom and got out just in time. Made a second fortune in real estate and got out before that crashed too. Timing is everything, I guess. But he isn’t the kind of person who should be running “development”. He never liked the Radspan project and it was his idea I think to build the hotel over it ’cause he was one of those people campaigning for the Winter Olympics back in 2000. He never really had faith in teleportation or mass travel and I guess, in the end, he’s right. It was never going to work for mass transit; it’s just too difficult, too expensive and too dangerous.