The Scioneer (9 page)

‘I just…
wanted to keep you safe.’

‘Keep me
safe! By handing me over to this guy?!’ Lek gave the unconscious
Delić a soft kick in the ribs.

‘He had a
knife to my face, for Ringo’s sake! A knife!’ Crystal fired back,
suddenly furious. ‘And let me remind you, Lek Gorski, that I
haven’t heard from you in months. And this is what you bring back?
Why the fuck should I care what happens to you? Perhaps you might
explain why you just vanished off the face of the
Earth?’

‘Because
they told me to!’ Lek shouted. He walked across the room and sat
down again on the beanbag. ‘They had a… quiet word in my ear, a few
months back. Told me that I shouldn’t be touching any of the
company’s products, including you. Said I should keep my distance
if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life creating chemical
cocktails one-handed.’ He shook his head despondently. ‘What a
mess.’

Crystal
wasn’t
ready to let up. ‘And now you turn up, out of the blue, like some
phantom in a tracksuit, saying you’ve stolen from them, that you’re
on the run and… and… look at my fucking door!’

Lek
wasn’t listening anymore;
he was talking to himself instead, ‘But how did he find me?
How did he find me?’ He turned to Crystal. ‘This wasn’t the same
guy who called you, was it?’

‘No
. The guy on
the phone had a thicker accent.’

‘I’m
guessing that was probably Vidmar. But then how did Delić know I
was here?’

Realis
ation
dawned. He pulled out the two bundles of creds from the pockets of
his sports suit – the C10,000 he kept back from the stash waiting
for him in the Smarte Storage Locker at Victoria Station – and
fanned though them. Sure enough, in the second bundle, he found
another strip of clear plastic.

‘What
is
that?’ asked
Crystal.

‘It’s
another bug. A tracking device. That’s how he followed me here.
They planted two bugs in the money, not one. Smart move. I’ve
already dumped the first.’ Lek nodded with grudging new-found
respect for Pechev. ‘And if this guy found me, then you can
guarantee he isn’t the only one looking.’

He
hande
d the plastic strip
to Crystal, who took a moment to inspect it, before taking a
cigarette lighter from her pocket.

‘No,
don’t do that….’ Lek stared into middle distance, calculating
something in his head. ‘Help me move the body out of
sight.’

Together
they shouldered Delić into the bedroom and left him sleeping like a
baby.

‘What now?’

‘Like I
said, we pay Danny Calabas a visit.’

Crystal looked
perplexed but Lek continued, ‘We’ll take your car. I can’t keep
wandering the streets while they’re searching for me. I’m playing
right into their hands.’

‘My car’s in
the garage – the biorg died a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t
got the money to get it fixed. Where’s your car anyway?’

‘Parked
outside my flat. No way I can just walk back and pick it up.
They’re bound to be expecting me to turn up there sooner or later…
Ok, so we go to the garage first, then Calabas’ place.’

‘Han
g on a
minute. It’s you they’re after, not me. I could just let you walk
out the door. Give me one good reason why I should come with
you?’

‘I’ll
give you three,’ said Lek. ‘First, whether you like it or not,
you’re tied up in this now. I’m sorry about that, you can blame me,
but that’s just the way it is. If they even suspect you of helping
me escape, they’ll kill you.’

‘Go on…’ said
Crystal, unmoved.

‘Second,
do you really want to be here when sleeping beauty wakes up? I
don’t think so.’

‘Fair enough.
What’s the third?’

‘I love
you. I’m escaping from this hell and I don’t want to leave you
behind. Ever again.’

Chapter
12

Cesar
Pitres hadn’t been able to concentrate when he sat with Janine and
worked though the month’s payroll. He called the meeting to an
early end, complaining of a headache, and retreated to the comfort
of his private bathroom. He pulled a fresh hypo out of his gym bag,
clipped a scion into the chamber and eased the needle into the
thick muscles at the base of his neck. If the drugs had any effect
these days, it was only a placebo
, but he welcomed the sensation all the same. He
closed his eyes, hoping for some release from the morning’s events,
but in his mind he only saw his old friend’s troubled face and
heard his pleas for help. It was useless. Perhaps a spell in the
gym would ease the tension...

Cesar
worked the weights for a full hour, lifting double his bodyweight
on the bench-press, before taking out his repressed anger on the
heavy bag for thirty minutes. By the time he had finished, the
hundred pound bag showed a dent the size of a bin lid, but Cesar
had hardly broken a sweat. He stared at his reflection in the full
length mirrors covering the wall. On the surface, he looked like an
ogre plucked straight from the pages of a book of fairy tales, but
beneath it all, Cesar knew he was still a man, still human, still
capable of feeling emotion, if not of showing it. And what he felt
at that moment was guilt. He shook his massive head, spun on his
heels and dealt the heavy bag a final crushing blow.

***

Vidmar
cursed as
he cruised around the corner of Stormont Street in his Enzyme just
in time to see Gorski and the woman walk out of the high-rise. Ten
minutes earlier and it would have all been over. He took some
solace in the fact that his suspicion had been confirmed. Gorski
might be a sad little scientist, wrapped up in his own statistics
and calculations but if he was planning on running, even he would
have to say his goodbyes first. Human nature again. It was also
some consolation that the Doctor was still alive – at least that
idiot Delić hadn’t found him yet. He slipped into a parking space,
stepped out of the car and watched them disappearing in the
direction of Clapham. He straightened his suit jacket. A kid
walking by stared open-mouthed at the jagged scar on his face, and
Vidmar grimaced back, hoping to give him nightmares that night. He
was hungry and it was affecting his judgement. He sloped into Ely’s
Pie and Mash Shop, sat down at a greasy table, ordered a plate of
Thames eels and considered his next move.

***

Lou
Tech’s
Autoshop was hidden down a side street near Clapham Junction, next
to an old scrap yard which was slowly being reclaimed by Mother
Nature. Lek checked the streets again, acutely aware that he was
still carrying the second iHare transponder in his pocket and could
be pinpointed by Pechev’s men at any moment.

They
stood in the forecourt of the garage for a few moments, trying the
catch the attention of the mechanics busying themselves with
nothing
in
particular.

Eventually they found Lou Tech himself. He rolled his eyes
as he peered up through the engine of the Lexus Neuro and saw
Crystal Purcell looking down at him. ‘If I’ve told you once,
treacle-tart, I’ve told you a hundred times, no car rolls out of
those gates until the bill has been paid. And I know, for a fact,’
he continued, as he shifted out from under the chassis, ‘that you
don’t have the creds to get the job done, so unless you and your
fella here want to push the piece of sh...’

Lek interrupted
him, ‘How long will it take to fix?’

Lou
wiped his
hands on an oil-stained towel hanging from his belt, and squeezed
his dirty fingers against the bridge of his nose. He had the look
of an old film star from the turn of the Millennium who had fallen
on hard times.

‘I’ve got
to change the bio-shocks on this one. That one there needs an
exhaust, methane-filter, haemic-filter. Then there’s a full service
on the Rhesus over there. Then there’s hers.’ He pointed at the
beaten–up Proto at the end of the workshop.

‘But the job
itself, how long will that take?’

‘Oh, got
you. Well, it’s just a dead biorg, so thirty minutes, three
quarters of an hour max,’

‘And how much
will it cost?’

‘600
cred.’

‘Bloody
hell Lou, the car only cost me that much when I bought it!’ Crystal
exclaimed.

‘Well it
wasn’t a biorg then. Listen baby, these are mates’ rates. Take it
to Spacagna’s Auto down the road, See how much he charges for a
biorg upgrade.’

‘I’ll give you
1000 cred if you can fix it now. Right now.’

‘What’s
your rush son? You on the run?’ Lou grinned. ‘Fine, a thousand.
It’ll be purring in an hour. Are you going to wait? Watch a master
at work if you like, or there’s a coffee machine in the
office.’

Lou
whistled
loudly and had one of his lackeys roll the Proto over to the pit.
He popped the bonnet and stared down at the dead biorg. In some
ways, he loved the job these days – it was so much easier now than
it had been fifteen years ago when he first got into the business,
straight out of a seven year stretch as an engineer in the Legion.
But in other ways, he missed getting his hands dirty - really dirty
– fixing up engines, working around a problem to find a solution,
before the advent of the biorg.

To think,
the biorg revolution had started as a quirky idea on a children’s
TV show. The heady techno-days had been and gone; the energy crisis
had put paid to any more development in the field of
telecommunications and electronics, and if the Hadron Collider
disaster of ’27 hadn’t been enough to put the public off the idea
of having a fridge-freezer powered by anti-matter and
God-particles, the thought of having nothing to put in it certainly
did. People had merrily returned to nature and embraced the notion
of living off the land. Allotments sprang up all over the city.
Carefully coiffured Japanese gardens had been converted into
chicken runs and pig sties, vegetables grew in window-boxes, and
fruit hung from hanging baskets. Overnight, funding for fission and
fusion was pulled, and any research into their future usage was
shelved. Since that time, the developed world had virtually stood
still. The only advances of any kind were retroactive, built on
technology which had since been surpassed and now, for the sake of
the planet, were being brought back to life. That was the very
thinking behind the biorg.

Whizz
er had once
been the most popular programme for the 8-11 year old market: a
chunk of global prime-time children’s TV, where kids with nothing
better to do were invited to share their ideas and inventions to
revolutionise the planet. Amongst the usual rubbish which came in
week after week – vacuum hoverboards, snot-powered rollerboots and
the like – an eleven year old from Ipswich named Josie Waters put
forward the idea of creating some kind of ‘super-rust’ which could
work
with
metal
rather than against it, helping machines to function not as
inanimate objects but rather as living organisms. Josie had even
supplied a pencil diagram of a car’s engine, covered in part by a
blob of the so-called ‘super-rust’. The picture now hangs in the
Europa Institute of Science and Technology in Prague, because
somebody in Jetstream Technologies was clearly paying attention to
Whizzer that night: within a month young Josie’s idea had been
snapped up, patented and copyrighted for the bargain price of a
lifetime’s supply of Kinder Eggs.

Jetstream, a Manchester-based company which primarily
produced organic fuel additives and lubricants, had been searching
for a new future since the energy crisis brought about the collapse
of the motor industry. They saw Josie’s idea as their last big
play. The science which followed was a work of art: genetically
modified amphibian stem cells were combined with common ferric
oxide to create Josie’s ‘super-rust’ (now
‘bio-organic-polymer-ferro-acetate-gel’) which
believed
, for want of a better word, that its job
was to plug the holes in decomposing metal, rather than create
them, meaning that vehicles and factory machinery could survive
long beyond their normal life-expectancy.

What the
scientists behind the research hadn’t foreseen however, was the
cells’ ability to adapt to new circumstances
. Evidence began to show that the
super-rust could regenerate from the trauma of a road traffic
accident or a fire for example, in the same way a living organism
might. They went back to the bar and mixed a new cocktail. By
taking motor-neurone stem cells, adding biological enzymes,
immuno-rich white blood cells and huge amounts of the coagulant
fibrinogen, the scientists had created the first ‘thinking’
organic-mechanical hybrid. They called it the biorg.

Biorg
technology had come a long way
since then, the science itself growing like one of its own
precocious offspring. In 2036, researchers at SKAMS, the Skoda
Academy of Motoring Science, produced preliminary evidence of a
biorg assimilating the fuel system of its ailing Mazda, not only
improving the car’s fuel efficiency in the weeks that followed, but
furthermore enabling it to run on waste organic materials – nut
husks, coffee grounds, even animal excrement. It was a nothing
short of a breakthrough.

Lou Tech
caught himself running a rubber-gloved hand over the sparse bristly
hairs of the dead biorg in Crystal Purcell’s Proto. It seemed that
biorgs themselves had a lifespan of around two years after
inception into an average engine. After that, like any other living
tissue, they withered and died. The one Lou was currently caressing
looked like a large, grey, deflated balloon with shrivelled
tendrils reaching into the workings of the engine.