He trailed after Louise as she walked over to the lifts with her brat sister and the huge private eye. She was very drowsy,
which relaxed her face. It left her delicate features unguarded and natural; a state which served only to amplify her beauty.
He wanted to put out a hand and stroke her exquisite cheeks, to see her smile gently at his touch. Welcome him.
She frowned, and rubbed her arms. “It’s cold down here.” The moment broke.
Quinn rode up to the surface with the trio, then left them as they went off to the taxi garage. He took a subwalk under the
busy road and hurried along one of the main streets radiating out from the station. There would only be a limited amount of
time until the supercops closed down the vac-trains.
The second alley leading off from the main street contained what he wanted. The Black Bull, a small, cheap pub, filled with
hard-drinking men. He moved among them, unseen as his expanded senses examined their clothing and skulls. None of them were
fitted with neural nanonics, but several were carrying processor blocks.
He followed one into the toilets, where the only electrical circuit was for the light panel.
Jack McGovern was peeing blissfully into the cracked urinal when an icy hand clamped round the back of his neck and slammed
his face into the wall. His nose broke from the impact, sending a torrent of blood to splash into the porcelain.
“You will take your processor block from your coat pocket,” a voice said. “Use your activation code, and make a call for me.
Do it now, or die, dickhead.”
Rat-arsed he might have been, but overdosing on self-preservation allowed Jack’s mind to focus with remarkable clarity on
his options. “Okay,” he mumbled, a lip movement which sent more blood dribbling down the wall. He fumbled for his processor
block. There was an emergency police-hail program which was activated by feeding in the wrong code.
The terrible pressure on his neck eased off, allowing him to turn. When he saw who his assailant was, the thought of deviously
calling for help withered faster than hell’s solitary snowflake.
______
Quinn returned to Kings Cross, sharing a lift down to the underground chamber with a cluster of vigilantes. He wandered through
the vaulting hall, ambling round the closed kiosks and steering clear of industrious cleaning mechanoids. The lifts kept on
disgorging gang members, who immediately took the wave escalators down to the platforms. He kept watching the informationals,
paying particular attention to the arrivals screens. In the two hours which followed, five vac-trains arrived from Edmonton.
All departures slowed down to zero.
The Frankfurt train pulled in at five minutes past five. Quinn went and stood at the top of its platform’s wave escalator.
They were the last to come up, Courtney and Billy-Joe gently guiding the drugged woman between them. The two acolytes had
smartened up, looking closer to a pair of grungy university students than downtown barbarians now. Their snatch victim—a middle-aged
woman wearing a crumpled dress with an unbuttoned cardigan—had the vacant eyes typical of a triathozine dose; her body fully
functional, brain in an advanced hypnoreception state. There and them, if she’d been told to jump off the top of an arcology
dome, she’d do it.
They moved at a brisk pace across the floor and hopped into a lift. Quinn wanted to materialize, just so he could cheer at
the top of his voice. The tide was turning now. God’s Brother had given His chosen messiah another sign that he remained on
the path.
At five-thirty, the sixth train from Edmonton arrived. A notice slithered over the holograms announcing that the routes to
North America had now been shut by order of Gov-central. Five minutes later, all departures were cancelled. Vac-trains already
en route to the arcology were being diverted to Birmingham and Glasgow. London was now physically isolated from the rest of
the planet.
It was just a little scary how his prediction had come so true. But then he was bound to be right, with God’s Brother gifting
him understanding.
People were coming up from the platforms: the last straggle of passengers, the vigilante gangs (already eyeing each other
now the reason for their truce was over), the police duty teams, station crews. Informationals floating overhead vanished
like pricked bubbles. Display boards blanked out. The twenty-four hour stalls closed up, their staff gossiping hotly together
at they rode the lifts up to the surface. The wave escalators halted. All the solaris lights overhead dimmed down, sinking
the cavern into a gloomy dusk. Even the conditioning fans slowed, their whine dropping several octaves.
It was the paranoiac moment every solipsist fears. The world was a stage constructed around him, and this chunk of it was
shutting down as it was no longer part of the act. For a second, Quinn worried that if he went to the dome wall and looked
out there would be nothing there to see.
“Not yet,” he said. “Soon though.”
He took a last look round, then went over to one of the emergency fire stairs and started the long trek to the surface and
the rendezvous point.
______
Louise was surprised at how much she associated the hotel room with
home
. But it was reassuring to be back after the ordeal of Edmonton. Partly it was because she now considered her obligation over:
she’d done what she promised dear Fletcher and warned Banneth. A small blow struck against that monster Dexter (even though
he’d never know). The fact that the Ritz was so comfortable helped a lot, too.
After Ivanov Robson dropped them off, both girls slept well into the morning. When they finally went downstairs for breakfast,
reception informed Louise there was a small package for her. It was a single dark-red rose in a white box, with a silver bow
tied round. The card that came with it was signed from Andy Behoo.
“Let me see,” Gen said, bouncing on her bed in excitement.
Louise smelt the rose, which to be honest was rather a weak scent. “No,” she said, and held the card aloft. “It’s private.
You can put this in water, though.”
Gen regarded the rose suspiciously, sniffing it cautiously. “Okay. But at least tell me what he says.”
“Just: thank you for last night. That’s all.” She didn’t mention the second half of the message, where he said how lovely
she was, and how he’d do anything to see her again.
The card was put into her new snakeskin bag, and the little pocket codelocked against small prying fingers.
Gen took one of the vases from the ancient oak dresser, and went off to the bathroom for some water. Louise datavised her
net connection server and inquired if there were any messages for her. The six-hourly ritual. Pointless, as the server would
automatically deliver any communiquÉ as soon as it received one.
There were no messages. Specifically, no messages from Tranquillity. Louise flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling
as she tried to puzzle it out. She knew she’d got the message protocol right; that was part of the NAS2600 communication program.
Something had to be wrong at the other end. But when she put the news hound into primary mode, there was no report of anything
untoward happening to Tranquillity. Perhaps Joshua simply wasn’t there, and her messages were piling up in his net server
memory.
She thought about it for a while, then composed a brief message to Ione Saldana herself. Joshua said he knew her, they’d grown
up together. If anybody knew where he was, she would.
After that, she launched a quick directory search and datavised detective Brent Roi.
“Kavanagh?” he replied. “God, you mean you bought yourself a set of neural nanonics?”
“Yes, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”
“No, but I thought your planet didn’t allow you that kind of technology.”
“I’m not on Norfolk now.”
“Yeah, right. So what the hell do you want?” he asked.
“I’d like to go to Tranquillity, please. I don’t know who I have to get permission from.”
“From me, I’m your case officer. And you can’t.”
“Why not? I thought you wanted us to leave Earth. If we got to Tranquillity, you wouldn’t have to worry about us any more.”
“Frankly, I don’t worry about you now, Miss Kavanagh. You seem to be behaving yourself—at least, you haven’t tripped any of
our monitor programs.”
Louise wondered if he knew about the bugs Andy had removed at Jude’s Eworld. She wasn’t going to volunteer the information.
“So why can’t I go?”
“I gather you haven’t got the hang of your news hound program yet.”
“I have.”
“Really. Then you ought know that as of oh-five-seventeen hours GMT, the global vac-train network was shut down by an emergency
Presidential executive decree. Every arcology is on its own. The President’s office says they want to prevent the possessed
in Paris and Edmonton from sneaking into more arcologies. Myself, I think it’s a load of crap, but the President is scared
of public opinion more than he is of the possessed. So like I told you before, you’re on Earth for the duration.”
“Already?” she whispered aloud. So much for Govcentral moving slowly. But Robson had been right again. “There must be a way
out of London to the tower,” she datavised.
“Only the vac-trains.”
“But how long will this go on for?”
“Ask the President. He forgot to tell me.”
“I see. Well, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. You want some advice? You have finite funds, right? You might consider shunting along to a different hotel.
And if this goes on for much longer, which I suspect it will, you’ll need a job.”
“A job?”
“Yeah, that’s one of those nasty little things ordinary people do, and in return they get given money by their employer.”
“There’s no need to be rude.”
“Eat it. When you apply to the local Burrow Burger as a waitress, or whatever, they’ll want your citizenship number. Refer
them to me, I’ll grant you temporary immigrant status.”
“Thank you.” That much sarcasm couldn’t be carried along a datavise, but he’d know.
“Hey, if you don’t fancy that, at least you’ve got an alternative. A girl like you won’t have any trouble finding a man to
look after her.”
“Detective Roi, can I ask what happened to Fletcher?”
“No, you can’t.” The link ended.
Louise looked out of the window across Green Park. Dark clouds swirled over the dome, hiding the sun. She wondered who’d sent
them.
______
It was a forty-storey octagonal tower in the Dalston district, one of eight similar structures that made up the Parsonage
Heights development. They were supposed to raise the general tone of the neighbourhood, encumbered as it was by low-cost housing,
bargain centre market halls, and a benefits-reliant population. The towers were supposed to rest on a huge underground warren
of factory and light manufacturing units. Above that buzzing industrial core, the first seven floors would be given over to
retail outlets, followed by five floors of leisure industry premises, three more floors of professional and commercial offices,
and the remaining floors taken up by residential apartments. The whole entity would be an economic heart transplant for Dalston,
creating opportunity and invigorating the maze of shabby ancient streets outside with rivers of commerce and new money.
But Dalston’s underlying clay had a water-table problem which would have tripled the cost of the underground factory warren
in order to prevent it from flooding, so it was downgraded to a couple of levels of storage warehousing.
The local market halls cut their rock bottom prices still further, leaving half of the retail units unrented; franchise chains
took over a meagre eight per cent of the designated leisure floorspace. In order to recoup their investment, Voynow Finance
hurriedly converted the thirty upper floors into comfortable apartments with a reasonable view across the Westminster Dome,
which market research indicated they could sell to junior and middle management executive types.
The rushed compromise worked, after a fashion. Certainly, sixty years after its construction, Parsonage Heights was home to
a slightly more affluent class than Dalston’s average. There were even some reasonable shops and cafÉs established on the
lower floors—though what activities went on in the dilapidated, damp, and crumbling warehouses hidden beneath was something
the top-floor residents declined to investigate.
The local police station knew there was a Light Bringer coven down there; but for whatever reason, the chief constable had
never instituted a raid. So when Banneth’s tube train pulled in at Dalston Kingsland station, the magus and a fifteen-strong
bodyguard was waiting with impunity on the platform to greet her. She took one look at the blank-faced young toughs carrying
their pathetic assortment of inferior weapons, and had trouble preventing a laugh.
Did you arrange this?
she asked Western Europe.
I simply told the magus how important you are to God’s Brother. He reacted appropriately, don’t you think?
Too appropriately. This is becoming a farce.
The Dalston coven magus stepped forwards, and bowed slightly. “High Magus, it’s an honour to have you here. We have your safe
house ready.”
“It better be a good one, or I’ll have you strapped down on your own altar and demonstrate how we deal with people who fail
God’s Brother in Edmonton.”
The magus’s vaguely hopeful air wafted away, leaving behind a belligerent expression. “You won’t be able to fault us.
Our
position hasn’t been compromised.”
She ignored the crude reference. “Lead on.”
The bodyguard clumped their way noisily up the carbon-concrete stairs and out onto Kingston High Street. The first four out
of the station’s automatic door levelled their TIP carbines along the road, which startled the few late-night pedestrians
heading home from the district’s grotty clubs. They swept their muzzles round in what they thought was a professional scanning
manoeuvre.
“Clear!” the leader barked.