“What do you think?” his supervisor datavised.
“I have never heard someone sprout quite so much bullshit in a single interview before,” Brent Roi replied. “Either she’s
a retard, or we’re up against a new type of possessed infiltration.”
“She’s not a retard.”
“Then what the hell is she? Nobody is that dumb, it’s not possible.”
“I don’t believe she’s dumb, either. Our problem is, we’re so used to dealing with horrendous complexities of subterfuge,
we never recognise the simple truth when we see it.”
“Oh come on, you don’t actually believe that story?”
“She is, as you said, from the Norfolk landowner class; that doesn’t exactly prepare her for the role of galactic master criminal.
And she is travelling with her sister.” “That’s just cover.”
“Brent, you are depressingly cynical.”
“Yes, sir.” He held on to his exasperation, it never made the slightest impression on his supervisor. The anonymous entity
who had guided the last twenty years of his life lacked many ordinary human responses. There were times when Brent Roi wondered
if he was actually dealing with a xenoc. Not that there was much he could do about that now; whatever branch of whatever agency
the supervisor belonged to, it was undoubtedly a considerable power within Govcentral. His own smooth, accelerated promotion
through the Halo police force was proof of that.
“There are factors of Miss Kavanagh’s story which my colleagues and I find uniquely interesting.”
“Which factors?” Brent asked.
“You know better than that.”
“All right. What do you want me to do with her?”
“Endron has confirmed the Phobos events to the Martian police, however we must establish exactly what happened to Kavanagh
on Norfolk. Initiate a direct memory retrieval procedure.”
______
Over the last five hundred years, the whole concept of Downtown had acquired a newish and distinctly literal meaning in New
York; naturally enough, so did Uptown. One thing, though, would never change; the arcology still jealously guarded its right
to boast the tallest individual building on the planet. While the odd couple of decades per century might see the title stolen
away by upstart rivals in Europe or Asia, the trophy always came home eventually.
The arcology now sprawled across more than four thousand square kilometres, housing (officially) three hundred million people.
With New Manhattan at the epicentre, fifteen crystalline domes, twenty kilometres in diameter, were clumped together in a
semicircle along the eastern seaboard, sheltering entire districts of ordinary skyscrapers (defined as buildings under one
kilometre high) from the pummelling heat and winds. Where the domes intersected, gigantic conical megatowers soared up into
the contused sky. More than anything, these colossi conformed to the old concept of “arcology” as a single city-in-a-building.
They had apartments, shopping malls, factories, offices, design bureaus, stadiums, universities, parks, police stations, council
chambers, hospitals, restaurants, bars, and spaces for every other human activity of the Twenty-seventh Century. Thousands
of their inhabitants were born, lived, and died inside them without ever once leaving.
At five and a half kilometres tall, the Reagan was the current global champion, its kilometre-wide base resting on the bedrock
where the town of Ridgewood had stood in the times before the armada storms. An apartment on any of its upper fifty floors
cost fifteen million fuseodollars apiece, and the last one was sold twelve years before they were built. Their occupants,
the new breed of Uptowners, enjoyed a view as spectacular as it was possible to have on Earth. Although impenetrably dense
cloud swathed the arcology for a minimum of two days out of every seven; when it was clear the hot air was very clear indeed.
Far below them, under the transparent hexagonal sheets which comprised the roof of the domes, the tide of life ebbed and flowed
for their amusement. By day, an exotic hustle as kaleidoscope rivers of vehicles flowed along the elevated 3D web of roads
and rails; by night, a shimmering tapestry of neon pixels.
Surrounding the Reagan, streets and skyscrapers fanned out in a radial of deep carbon-concrete canyons, like buttress roots
climbing up to support the main tower. The lower levels of these canyons were badly cluttered, where the skyscraper bases
were twice as broad as their peaks, and the elevated roads formed a complex intersecting grid for the first hundred and fifty
metres above the ground. High expressways throwing off curving slip roads at each junction down to the local traffic lanes;
broad freight-only flyovers shaking from the eighty-tonne autotrucks grumbling along them twenty-four hours a day, winding
like snakes into tunnels which led to sub-basement loading yards; metro transit carriages gliding along a mesh of rails so
labyrinthine that only an AI could run the network. Rents were cheap near the ground, where there was little light but plenty
of noise, and the heavy air gusting between dirty vertical walls had been breathed a hundred times before. Entropy in the
arcology meant a downward drift. Everything that was worn-out, obsolete, demode, economically redundant—down it came to settle
on the ground, where it could descend no further. People as well as objects.
Limpet-like structures proliferated among the crisscross of road support girders bridging the gap between the skyscrapers,
shanty igloos woven from salvaged plastic and carbotanium composite, multiplying over the decades until they clotted into
their own light-killing roof. Under them, leeched to the streets themselves, were the market stalls and fast-food counters;
a souk economy of fifth-hand cast-offs and date-expired sachets shuffled from family to family in an eternal round robin.
Crime here was petty and incestuous, gangs ruled their turf, pushers ruled the gangs. Police made token patrols in the day,
and went off-shift as the unseen sun sank below the rim of the domes above.
This was Downtown. It was everywhere, but always beneath the feet of ordinary citizens, invisible. Quinn adored it. The people
who dwelt here were almost in the ghost realm already; nothing they did ever affected the real world.
He walked up out of the subway onto a gloomy street jammed with canopied stalls and wheel-less vans, all with their skirt
of goods guarded by vigilant owners. Graffiti struggled with patches of pale mould for space on the skyscraper walls. There
were few windows, and those were merely armoured slits revealing little of the mangy shops and bars inside. Metallic thunder
from the roads above was as permanent as the air which carried it.
Several looks were quickly thrown Quinn’s way before eyes were averted for fear of association. He smiled to himself as he
strode confidently among the stalls. As if his attitude wasn’t enough to mark him out as an interloper, he had clothed himself
in his jet-black priest robe again.
It was the simplest way. He wanted to find the sect, but he’d never been to New York before. Everybody in Downtown knew about
the sect, this was their prime recruiting ground. There would be a coven close by, there always was. He just needed someone
who knew the location.
Sure enough, he hadn’t got seventy metres from the subway when they saw him. A pair of waster kids busy laughing as they pissed
on the woman they’d just beaten unconscious. Her two-year-old kid lay on the sidewalk bawling as blood and urine pooled round
its feet. The victim’s bag had been ripped apart, scattering its pitiful contents on the ground around her. They put Quinn
in mind of Jackson Gael; late-adolescence, with pumped bodies, their muscle shape defined by some exercise but mostly tailored-hormones.
One of them wore a T-shirt with the slogan: CHEMICAL WARFARE MACHINE. The other was more body-proud, favouring a naked torso.
He was the one who saw Quinn first, grunted in amazement, and nudged his partner. They sealed their flies and sauntered over.
Quinn slowly pushed his hood down. Hyper-sensitive to trouble, the street was de-populating rapidly. Pedestrians, already
nervous from the mugging, slipped away behind the forest of support pillars. Market stall shutters were slammed down.
The two waster kids stopped in front of Quinn, who grinned in welcome. “I haven’t had sex for ages,” Quinn said. He looked
straight at the one wearing the T-shirt. “So I think I’ll fuck you first tonight.”
The waster kid snarled, and threw a punch with all the strength his inflated muscles could manage. Quinn remained perfectly
still. The fist struck his jaw, just to the left of his chin. There was a crunch which could easily be heard above the traffic’s
clamour. The waster kid bellowed, first in shock, then in agony. His whole body shook as he slowly pulled his hand back. Every
knuckle was broken, as if he had punched solid stone. He cradled it with frightened tenderness, whimpering.
“I’d like to say take me to your leader,” Quinn said, as if he hadn’t even noticed the punch. “But organising yourselves takes
brains. So I guess I’m out of luck.”
The second waster kid had paled, shaking his head and taking a couple of steps backward.
“Don’t run,” Quinn said, his voice sharp.
The waster kid paused for a second, then turned and bolted. His jeans burst into flames. He screamed, stumbling to a halt,
and flailing wildly at the burning fabric. His hands ignited. The shock silenced him for a second as he held them up disbelievingly
in front of his face. Then he screamed again, and kept on screaming, staggering about drunkenly. He crashed into one of the
flimsy stalls which crumpled, folding about him. The fire was burning deeper into his flesh now, spreading along his arms,
and up onto his torso. His screaming became weaker as he bucked about in the smouldering wreckage.
The T-shirted kid raced over to him. But all he could do was look down in a horror of indecision as the flames grew hotter.
“For Christ’s sake,” he wailed at Quinn. “Stop it. Stop it!”
Quinn laughed. “Your first lesson is that God’s Brother cannot be stopped.”
The body was motionless and silent now, a black glistening husk at the centre of the flames. Quinn put a hand on the shoulder
of the sobbing waster kid at his side. “It hurts you, doesn’t it? Watching this?”
“Hurts! Hurts? You bastard.” Even with a face screwed up from pain and rage, he didn’t dare try to twist free from Quinn’s
hand.
“I have a question,” Quinn said. “And I’ve chosen you to answer it for me.” His hand moved down, caressing the waster kid’s
chest before it reached his crotch. He tightened his fingers round the kid’s balls, aroused by the fear he was inflicting.
“Yes, God, yes. Anything,” the kid snivelled. His eyes were closed, denying what he could of this nightmare.
“Where is the nearest coven of the Light Bringer sect?”
Even with the pain and dread scrambling his thoughts, the waster kid managed to stammer: “This dome, district seventeen, eighty-thirty
street. They got a centre somewhere along there.”
“Good. You see, you’ve learnt obedience, already. That’s very smart of you. I’m almost impressed. Now there’s only one lesson
left.”
The waster kid quailed. “What?”
“To love me.”
______
The coven’s headquarters had chewed its way, maggot-fashion, into the corner of the Hauck skyscraper on eighty-thirty street.
What had once been a simple lattice of cube rooms, arranged by mathematics rather than art, was now a jumbled warren of darkened
chambers. Acolytes had knocked holes in some walls, nailed up barricades in the corridors, pulled down ceilings, sealed off
stairwells; drones shaping their nest to the design of the magus. From the outside it looked the same, a row of typically
shabby Downtown shops along the street, selling goods cheaper than anywhere else—they could afford to, everything was stolen
by the acolytes. But above the shops, the slim windows were blacked out, and according to the building management processors,
the rooms unoccupied, and therefore not liable to pay rent.
Inside, the coven members buzzed about industriously twenty-four hours a day. Looked at from a strictly corporate viewpoint,
which was how magus Garth always regarded his coven, it was quite a prosperous operation. Ordinary acolytes, the real sewer-bottom
shit of the human race, were sent out boosting from the upper levels; bringing back a constant supply of consumer goodies
that were either used by the sect or sold off in the coven-front shops and affiliated street market stalls. Sergeant acolytes
were deployed primarily as enforcers to keep the others in line, but also to run a more sophisticated distribution net among
the dome’s lower-middle classes; competing (violently) with ordinary pushers out in the bars and clubs. Senior acolytes, the
ones who actually had a working brain cell, were given didactic memory courses and employed running the pirate factory equipment,
bootlegging MF albums, black sense-vise programs, and AV activant software; as well as synthesizing an impressive pharmacopoeia
of drugs, hormones, and proscribed viral vectors.
In addition to these varied retail enterprises, the coven still engaged in the more traditional activities of crime syndicates.
Although sensevise technology had essentially eliminated a lot of prostitution outside of Downtown, that still left protection
rackets, extortion, clean water theft, blackmail, kidnapping, data theft, game-rigging, civic-service fraud, power theft,
embezzlement, and vehicle theft, among others.
The coven performed all of them with gusto, if not finesse. Magus Garth was satisfied with their work. They hadn’t missed
their monthly target in over three years, making the required financial offering to New York’s high magus over in dome two.
His only worry was that the High Magus could realize how lucrative the coven was, and demand a higher offering. Increased
payments would cut into Garth’s personal profits, the eight per cent he’d been skimming every month for the last five years.
There were times when Garth wondered why nobody had noticed. But then, looking at sergeant acolyte Wener, maybe he shouldn’t
be all that surprised. Wener was in his thirties, a big man, but rounded rather than wedge-shaped like most of the acolytes.
He had a thick beard, dark hair sprouting from his face in almost simian proportions. His head was in keeping with the rest
of his body, though Garth suspected the bone thickness would be a lot greater than average. An overhanging forehead and jutting
chin gave him a permanently sullen, resentful expression—appropriately enough. You couldn’t geneer that quality, it was a
demonstration that the incest taboo was finally starting to lose force among Downtown residents. Fifteen years in the sect,
and Wener was as far up the hierarchy as he’d ever get.