With every possessed in Edmonton assembled (except one, Quinn thought glumly), Quinn had given the order to advance. If the
supercops were as good as he suspected, then the response would be swift and effective. None of the possessed, and few acolytes,
would survive.
Quinn walked the first few paces with his small doomed army as they flooded out into the streets, pulling out their weapons
and taking on a variety of gruesome appearances. Once everyone was committed, he discreetly slipped away into the ghost realm.
Those civilians lucky enough to be behind the possessed when they emerged slowed their retreat and glanced nervously over
their shoulders. The more commercially minded among them contacted local media offices and began to relay sensevises. Anyone
receiving the show was presented with an astonishing display of defiance; the deliberate flaunting of a prowess which even
the possessed could never truly own. A magnificent final charade, blowing their cover in a single grand
fuck you
gesture. Entire offices of editorial staff froze in slack-jawed amazement at what they were witnessing.
The marchers closed swiftly on the unexceptional fifty-storey skyscraper. There were over a hundred in each of the groups,
spearheaded by the possessed. Elaborate, archaic warrior costumes sparked and flashed, ripe with energistic power. Whenever
they passed the pillars which supported elevated roads, the air would seethe with wrestling coils of miniature lightning bolts,
grounding out through the metal amid jittering spumes of molten droplets. Following close behind their silent deadly leaders,
the bulk of each group was made up by the non-possessed acolytes; striding along blithely, weighed down by the largest pieces
of weapons hardware the covens had stashed away in their secret armouries.
None of them paid any attention to the whimpering civilians scampering out of their way, they were focused on the skyscraper
alone. Vehicles littering the street ahead of them flared electric-blue before bursting apart into a sleet of black granules.
The army of the damned walked through the smouldering wreckage. Again, it was all panache. Showtime.
To the majority of Edmonton’s citizens, the skyscraper that was the centre of their wrath was just a modest, ordinary building
divided into standard commercial and residential sections. The police knew different, as did most of the locals. Rumours of
the sect presence inside began to filter back to the media anchors. But by then professional rover reporters were on the scene,
watching the police seal off the area and armed squads take up position.
Sixty per cent of Earth’s population was now on-line, waiting for the shoot out. The greatest audience in history.
Inside the sect headquarters, the senior acolytes broke open the armoury and began handing out heavy-calibre chemical projectile
rifles and machine guns to the acolytes. There was little panic; the beleaguered sect members were almost glad they had a
tangible enemy at last. Banneth herself supervised setting up their defences. First she established a ring of snipers peeking
through the skyscraper’s windows, then consolidated their heavier firepower around the convoluted barriers inside.
She hurried round all of them, issuing orders and offering encouragement—never threats, not now. Quinn and the possessed had
become the new fear-figures. It was interesting that they had now returned to her. After all Quinn had done to fill them with
doubt and mistrust, the random tortures and deaths he had silently enacted throughout the headquarters had come to nothing
in the end. They still believed that she was the stronger of the two.
You realize this is probably a diversion, don’t you?
she asked.
He’s most likely planning to snatch me or kill me in the battle.
Possibly,
Western Europe replied equitably.
Personally, I believe this pathetic conflict he’s staging is purely a case of collateral slaughter while he achieves his real
goal: escaping from our grasp.
Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.
Frightened? You?
Wouldn’t you be?
If I was physically in your position, no doubt I would, yes. But I’m not, am I?
Don’t give me that natural superiority crap.
I apologise.
Very magnanimous. Does that mean you’ve got the SD platforms zeroed in on me?
I’m afraid so, yes. Again, I doubt if we’ll have to use them. Quinn won’t reveal himself, not today.
Banneth took a look along the familiar darkened corridors of the headquarters as she made her way back to her own rooms. On
her orders, they were lit with candles and crude chemical batteries powering low-voltage halogen bulbs—technology the possessed
would be unable to glitch without considerable effort. Not that it particularly mattered, she thought, we’re not protecting
anything we can salvage. After this, the headquarters would be no more. All her acolytes were doing was fighting a delaying
action until the police and B7 eliminated Quinn’s ersatz invasion. But then, the sect was nothing more than a B7 creation
anyway. A convenient umbrella for them and her.
She walked through the temple giving it a nostalgic look. The first rocket hit the skyscraper; a light EE tipped antiarmour
missile. Duffy fired it; Quinn had given him the honour of opening the fighting as a reward for unswerving loyalty to the
cause of Night. The explosion sent shockwaves yammering through the skyscraper’s structure, blowing out a huge crater on the
northern corner and shattering hundreds of surrounding windows. Huge lumps of rubble cascaded down onto the street to smash
apart in front of the possessed. The surviving snipers inside picked themselves up and opened fire.
______
The vac-train carriage had seating for a hundred. Louise, Genevieve, and Ivanov Robson were the only people using it. In fact,
Louise had only seen a dozen or so people milling about on the platform at King’s Cross when they got on. She wasn’t sure
if they were passengers or station staff.
Despite her growing uncertainty, and Gen’s sulky resentment, she’d followed the private detective in through the airlock door.
Even now there was something about him that reassured her. Even beyond physical size, he had a self-confidence greater than
Joshua. Which was saying a lot. She settled back with dreamy thoughts of her fiancÉ filling her mind. Although the seats were
worn, they were comfortable; and her alcohol suppresser program was off. Joshua had such a warm smile, she remembered. It
would be so nice to have it shine on her again.
“I love you, and I’m coming back for you.” His words. Spoken to her when they were naked and alone, their bodies clinging
together. A promise that could be nothing but totally honest.
I
will
find him again, despite all this horrid mess.
Her news hound program alerted her to the situation developing in Edmonton. She went through Time Universe to access a sensevise
of the fight. And there she was, crouched behind one of the abandoned buses, peering cautiously round the front at the crazy
army marching along the street. Dazzling white fireballs were pumping up from a dozen up-stretched hands, smacking into the
skyscraper. Flames were roaring out of windows and missile craters all the way up the first eight or nine stories. Heavy-calibre
guns were firing down in retaliation, pummelling the carbon-concrete sidewalk with small intense topaz explosions. Several
bodies were scattered along the street, clothes still smouldering from beam weapon scorches.
Figures began to race past the bus. Police in dark-grey armour suits, hauling even larger automatic guns than those in use
up ahead. Their movements were arachnid, scuttling from cover to cover. They began to fire; the discharge from their weapons
a continuous howl ripping into the delicate tissue of her inner ear. She started, hands halfway to her ears before the reporter’s
audio limiter program cut in. Then she was ducking down as multiple explosions ploughed up the street. White fireballs flew
directly overhead.
Louise reduced the sensevise to monitor function, bundling it away until it became a vivid real-time memory. She looked at
Ivanov. “Now what?” she asked. “They won’t let this train into Edmonton now, will they? Surely?”
“They ought to. Access the overview commentary. The possessed are concentrated in one area, and the police have them contained.
They’ve got enough firepower concentrated on them to exterminate ten times as many as there are on the ground. Besides, if
we were being diverted, the train company would have told us immediately.”
Louise accessed the carriage’s processor, and requested a schedule update. It reported that they were going to arrive in Edmonton
in forty-one minutes. “That doesn’t make any sense. The authorities were paranoid about outbreaks before.”
“It’s politics. Edmonton is trying to prove they don’t have a problem with the possessed; that they’re on top of the situation.”
“But—”
“I know. They should have waited until after this fight is over before any grand announcements. Being premature with the good
news is hardly new for Govcentral. As soon as the Edmonton isolation was announced, a lot of highly connected lobbyists will
have been called in to pressure the president’s office and sympathetic senators to have the vac-train lines re-opened. If
Edmonton is taken out of the global economic loop, all the companies in the arcology will start to fall behind their competitors;
and an entire arcology is a huge market for outside companies to sell into; that’s a factor, too.”
“They’re endangering people because of money?” Louise asked in astonishment. “That’s awful.”
“Welcome to Earth.”
“Don’t they understand what’ll happen if the possessed get into other arcologies?”
“Of course they do. Now the possessed have been exposed in Edmonton, there’ll be an equal amount of pressure applied to close
the vac-trains down again. Action and reaction, Louise.”
“You mean we might not get out after we arrive?”
“We will. There’ll be enough time. I promised you: back home again in five hours. Remember?”
She glanced over at Gen, who was sleeping, curled up in the seat, her small face scowling even as she dreamed. “I remember.”
Not that there was much she could do about her worries now. The train was going to stop in the arcology. She hadn’t felt this
out of control since that first mad horse ride away from Cricklade the day Quinn Dexter appeared.
______
That the fight around the skyscraper would be uneven was never in doubt. Even so, the effectiveness of the police tactical
team was impressive. Heavy-calibre portable weapons deployed by the front line were backed up by X-ray lasers from the rear
support groups, far enough back to resist glitching by the possessed. As a consequence, very few possessed actually made it
in to the skyscraper; and judging by the amount of gunfire coming from inside, the sect members weren’t exactly a pushover.
That was where the commercial sensevise coverage ended. B7 immediately switched to the surviving sensors in the headquarters,
watching nervous, indistinct figures creeping along dark smoke-filled corridors. One of them walked over a grid with twenty
thousand volts running through it. The body ignited into a pillar of flame hot enough to melt the concrete corridor around
it.
“Well, that’s a neat trick,” Northern Europe said. “What kind of energy level is that, do you think?”
“Could be total chemical conversion,” Central America suggested. “It can’t be a direct mass energy reaction. That would eliminate
the entire arcology.”
“Hardly relevant,” South Pacific said.
“On the contrary,” Central America said. “The more we learn of their ability, the closer we come to defeating them.”
“You can hardly classify their death throes as part of their ability.”
“All information is useful,” Western Europe said, deliberately bleeding a note of snobbery in to his representation’s voice.
“We wouldn’t have had this kind of success without it.”
“Success?” South Pacific pointed at the image above the conference table. The possessed had burnt out, leaving a human sculpture
of ash standing amid the drizzle of molten carbon-concrete. It pitched over, disintegrating into a slush of grey flakes. “That’s
a success; Edmonton under siege from the possessed? May we please be preserved from your failures.”
“By studying the data on Dexter we determined his likely course of action. I told you he’d betray the remaining possessed
to us. This merely proves I was right all along.”
“And Edmonton is not under siege,” North America said. “The police tactical teams have the possessed surrounded.”
“Wrong,” South Pacific said. “That friend of Carter McBride won’t be among this group. You haven’t got him surrounded.”
“He is not a threat to anyone other than Dexter,” Western Europe said.
“Only in your book. As far as I’m concerned, nothing has changed. One invisible possessed and one elusive possessed are running
round loose. Your territories remain embargoed.”
“Thank heavens for that. We all know what would happen to Edmonton if you had any say in events over here.”
“At least with my way only one arcology suffers. I can’t believe you’re willing to expose another to Dexter.”
“You can’t win at this level without taking risks. And I do intend to win. Dexter is the epitome of all we have fought against
these last five hundred years. He is the yobbish anarchy that B7 has successfully banished from this world. I’ll not have
him return. The investment in blood and money it has cost us must be honoured.”
“You sound like a third-rate Shakespearean king the night before battle. Damn, and you accuse me of arrogance.”
______
Banneth walked back into her sanctum as the police tactical team searched through the rest of the sect headquarters for any
possessed that might have survived the assault. She knew none had, but it wasn’t her place to interfere. The North American
supervisor had given the police commissioner instructions that she was to be left alone, along with her suite of rooms. Senior
officers had taken up position outside the doors to enforce the order in case any of the tactical team turned bolshie. People
hyped high on adrenaline after a fight were liable to have a healthy disregard for authority, especially where the possessed
were concerned.