Cloud Castles (27 page)

I heard my breath rasp across my helmet mike. ‘That’s an understatement! And you never forgot?’

‘No. Not really. The first time was pretty incredible, but I had those odd bandages on my ankles, soaked in peculiar herbs; they worked, too. I couldn’t forget that. If I stayed away too long the whole thing’d begin to drift out of my head at times, seem more and more like a silly dream; so I always went back when that started to happen. I was scared I’d lose it. But there was more than that. Somehow out there I could achieve things, I wasn’t always fighting the weight of events or the people pressures I was here. A complete contrast – and it just made me madder with things here. I got more and more determined and more insecure; I blamed myself. If I could do good out there, why not here?’

‘And you began to feel torn?’ I didn’t know why I volunteered that just then. She looked at me, just as startled.

‘Yes! Until one day, I stumbled … No, I don’t want to tell you about that. It was the Graal, anyway; it called me, and I followed. I was dazed, but I couldn’t make the break, I wasn’t ready. Out here, it was great, but – I couldn’t really believe in its problems when I wasn’t in the thick of them. I didn’t want to abandon the Core, the Department – they seemed more real, somehow. The tension pulled me this way, that way, till I got really afraid I’d tear apart, crack up completely, have a breakdown. That was where I was about the time we started probing you.’ She shifted uneasily, but she didn’t look away; I would have had to.

‘You … you looked
so bloody successful, so self-satisfied and sleek and sharply dressed and handsome in that sort of way. And you drove the kind of car I couldn’t afford even on a good EC wage. And at first you had a ghastly private life; later on, you seemed to have less and less private life at all. I thought all wanderers would be like me, unhappy sideliners: it never occurred to me that you might be another. Or I might be seeing just one side of you, and the best might be … somewhere else. So I thought,
Just let me get him, just him – and then I’ll be free to go.
Really free.’ She clutched the edge of the control panel, and shuddered. ‘That’s why I went after you, even when my boss tried to cool the file because we weren’t getting anywhere. And then you caught me and beat the daylights out of me, and blew my cover … and I got referred for psychiatrics … and suspended pending transfer … That’s when I thought I’d have to shoot you outright.’

She rubbed a hand across her lips. ‘God, why am I telling you all this? Only, when you could have put me out of the way so easily … when I tried to shoot you … you would have. If you’d been von Amerningen’s man you’d have done it in a second, you wouldn’t have dared do anything else. But you didn’t. You even gave me my pistol back.’ She slumped down in her seat. ‘I nearly used it on myself. I didn’t understand, I couldn’t grasp a thing, and yet I knew I’d been wrong, wrong, wrong. That was the last straw. I quit, I moved out, I ran. I ran to the Graal, and it took me in, and healed me. It gave me back myself, the self I should have been. The years since then have been just—’

‘Years?’
I barely stopped myself letting go the throttle. ‘My God, that was just a couple of nights ago to me! I haven’t even caught up on my sleep since then … though that nap in the valley was amazing.’

‘It would be,’ she said, and her face softened suddenly. ‘I remember the first time I slept there. But you know what the Spiral’s like. It’s been five years for me.’

‘Yes, I know. If anything you look younger.’

Suddenly she did smile, and that alone was the biggest transformation yet. But before I could tell her that, the navcom chimed softly through my phones. We were getting near Stuttgart, and I had to begin the long sweep down out of the clouds that would keep us clear of other flight corridors. I switched on to the local tower, and was about to start paging their controllers when the woman – no – Alison put a hand on my knee. The sudden intimacy was so unexpected I froze, though she only wanted to interrupt.

‘Not at the
heliport,’ she said over the link. ‘Can’t you put us down as near as possible to wherever the Spear is? It’ll be far safer.’

I winced. The days when you could muck around like that were long gone; there’d been too many aircraft accidents over cities. On the other hand, we were headed for the edge of town; and it might be easier than trying to get a pack of hussars through airport security. I turned away to circle the city, and ducked down as if I were headed away again, lower and lower. If only the bloody landscape hadn’t been so flat I could have got off radar more easily. I had to go a long way out and then come hedgehopping back by a zigzag route, praying I saw all the power lines, wind farms and similar obstructions in time. But at last the geometric patterns of the industrial development opened up before me, alongside a venous bunch of railway tracks, and I brought the little craft side slipping in behind a conveniently large warehouse.

‘We can’t leave it here long,’ I hissed as we bumped down into the empty parking lot, the downdraught tipping a stack of empty cartons and whipping up a faint haze of spray. ‘Somebody’s bound to report it and we’ll have a police chopper overhead or on our tail. But we shouldn’t need long!’

I slid back the door onto cool, rain-washed night air. Dragovic and the guards spilled out, groaning with relief and sticking fingers in their ringing ears. As the woman called Alison stepped down Dragovic moved swiftly to her side, and loomed there protectively when I ducked out. Was that the way the wind blew? It might explain his ruthless drive for success. ‘How far is it?’ he growled.

‘Two minutes,’ I said, and turned to the complex of lower buildings just across the lot.

‘You know your way?’ she demanded, as we padded swiftly across the slick tarmac, Dragovic and the guards casting dark glances around them. ‘Won’t there be trouble with security men? Alarm systems? We know a few useful tricks for dealing with those.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t. There
won’t be any trouble. I own this place – my company, anyhow.’ I fumbled for my key-case, hard to get out of these tight pockets, and fished out a strip of plastic with the spidery outline of a chip embedded into it. When we reached the gate I shoved it into a slot, spoke a few words into the shielded microphone and clapped my palm to the green-lit panel that uncovered below. There was an instant’s delay, and the courtyard lighting went on. ‘Bugger! The local manager’s been adding refinements, I didn’t want that. Come on!’

I went through the same routine at an inner door, though this time I had to speak rather longer, and touch my index fingers to the panel as well. ‘ID, voice and print,’ nodded the woman. ‘Not bad. All the usual alarms, too?’

‘The lot.’ We opened the building door and slipped inside, boots squeaking on the glossy black flooring with its broad coloured stripes, eccentrically set. ‘But the main thing to watch out for is the automatic pallets – here’s one now.’ Along the yellow line in front of us glided a low rectangle, edged with yellow stripes, topped with a pile of small crates and packages, plus its unloading arms and the gas supply for its ground-effect flotation pucks. Hissing faintly, it swung cumbersomely around to follow the inlaid line in the floor, and vanished among rows of stacks. Over to one side the arm mechanisms that had loaded it clacked back into their racks. The others watched it go, obviously impressed. I turned to the woman. ‘Lutz was even talking about getting those American guard-robots, too, for some buildings. Basically a mobile infra-red scanner with programmable discrimination and patrol patterns, plus built-in high voltage stun-guns. Or a Colt .35 auto mechanism, if you really want to be left alone; but I wouldn’t have that, and nor would the local cops. We tried one stun model. The second night somebody left a nice warm computer running and the robot shocked the bejasus out of it. Shorted the whole network. Back it went.’

The woman – no – Alison chuckled. ‘What on earth is this place?’

‘The local C-Tran depot. I’ve never been here, but they’re all to the same layout, more or less. What we need is a local terminal for the main freight computer – should be one right by the heavy-duty conveyor that brings in really massive pallets, machinery and so on, see there? And here it is. All the symbology’s German, but that doesn’t matter …’

It stood on a pedestal to the side of
a long conveyor used for really heavy pallets, machinery and so on. I began tapping keys, and somewhere else in the warehouse we heard another pair of arms clack out, ready to shift a new load. Machinery hummed softly, and a pair of pallets swung into view, clearing the most direct path.

The others were visibly nervous, Dragovic tugging at his collar, Alison fidgeting with the panel’s corner moulding. ‘It’s here, then?’

‘Yes. Just a minute or two now.
Damn!’

‘What’s wrong?’ she spat.

I glared at the blinking characters.

‘Nothing, nothing. Just some programmer playing silly buggers. It’s here.’

She sagged slightly. ‘Thank God. So you just parcelled it up and sent it off down your freight system. You didn’t know any better, but it was a terrible risk you took, even using a roundabout route. They could just have got into the computer and traced any packages sent from that office around that time. Lutz could do that, or somebody else; they can get real experts. Or they could just have forced you to give away the route.’

I grinned. ‘No, they couldn’t. They couldn’t force me, because I never knew; and the computer couldn’t show any such package because there wasn’t any.’

‘Then how—’

I chuckled. ‘You know how the system
works? No? The idea’s not so complex. I was getting fed up with all the delays in international shipping – consignments spending ages waiting for clearance or trans-shipment to road or rail or air, or just till somebody can fill a container or guarantee a return load, that kind of thing. Even when the EC brought down customs barriers they were replaced by a battery of checks that were ten times worse, security, health, you name it. Plus consignments would get lost, sidelined, mishandled; every delay increased the chances of that happening. I spent a lot of my time wishing the whole thing could be simplified, that the consignments could look after themselves. And I began to see how they could. A single freight network, in continuous motion, each road or rail or water or air link co-ordinated and continuously monitored by computer systems. And smart packaging – each consignment, even the smallest parcel, with its own on-board computer instead of a label. A pretty simple job, sturdy, fail-safe, but smart enough to know its own identity, contents, despatch and delivery addresses and any other special conditions, and stay in touch with the main network. That way the network knows where each consignment is, each parcel knows where it is, and between them they choose the most efficient route, even from one end of a warehouse to the other – and if anything goes wrong on the way they can modify it. So our freight-carriers are always used to maximum capacity, nothing has to hang around, and we always know exactly where it is and when it’ll get anywhere, when it leaves the system and so on. And it has total integrity, because the computer knows when it’s being mucked about. And you can’t get at the computer without destroying the packaging; and you can’t do that without alerting the main computer. You can’t even identify a consignment without alerting the main computer. That let us negotiate international agreements so that each consignment only needs to be checked at despatch and delivery, when the label is programmed. Hey presto! No checks, no pilfering, no delays. Interfere with a consignment and it screams for help. Delay it, and it finds its own way around. Dead simple. All you need to do is make it work.’

Alison grimaced. ‘Right. That’s all. And how often’ve you reeled off
that
little spiel?’

I grimaced back. ‘You mean, apart from in my sleep? I’ve lost count.’

‘But if you say there wasn’t any parcel or whatever …’

Between the two diverted pallets, their unloading arms
raised as if in salute, glided another, empty except for a large plastic case, elegantly striped with the C-Tran logo and slogans in a host of languages, but already looking rather battered. ‘Pity I can’t ever use this in an ad. You see, a system like ours depends one hundred per cent on efficient circulation. One log-jam somewhere, one undetected breakdown and we lose a huge part of our advantage over more conventional methods. So it has to be monitored constantly, by including test loads in the system, always in motion, always circulating, never unloaded, reporting their progress and all the other conditions by onboard computers and telemetry gear, which is normally all they contain.’ I grinned. Till now. Of course we have to divert them now and again to repair the gear and so on, but that’s listed under maintenance, not freight. And they get checked to see they’re not used for smuggling – but not within the EC, naturally. In the day or two since I put it in there your Spear’s been on a free tour of Europe and back, untraceable and inaccessible except by someone who thought of the maintenance system and knew how to get into it – something my dear partner Lutz would never dream of dirtying his hands with. And who knew which of all the various test loads it might be, and had the skill to trace it. Force wouldn’t leave me in any state to do that. Some kind of possession might, but not if I’m on my guard.’

Alison the Graal Knight perched on the broad ledge alongside the conveyor and watched wide-eyed, swinging her legs, as the pallet sighed to a halt at her feet. ‘I read up on all this for your dossier,’ she said. ‘Never a word about test loads. And you know what? I should’ve realized you knew about the Spiral and the Core, too. You’ve gone and created a sort of microcosm here, a secret world, in constant flux.’

I leaned over the case, slid another chip-key into its lock and popped open the lid. Alison gave an excited gasp. There, across a tangle of ribbon cables linking various sullen beige instrument boxes, lay the long metal casing Le Stryge had provided for the Spear. I was just stretching out a hand to lift it when I heard a metallic click that wasn’t any of the usual warehouse noises – too close. My eyes flicked from one image to another, at the extreme edges of my vision.