Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two Page 10

  Asshole.

  She focused on Kilborn once more.

  ‘—xenopsych and primary linguistic mapping,’ he was saying. ‘Poliakov and his people did a terrific job, following on from you, and Peter Chong’s group have everything we need to take it to this next stage.’

  Rekka swallowed. Simon would have a game plan all mapped out, but she was winging it, still trying to work out the background.

  ‘It sounds substantial,’ she said. ‘So what kind of duration are we talking about?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Kilborn. ‘Well, seven months is our initial estimate.’

  McStuart nodded.

  ‘And when the project is complete,’ she said. ‘What then? Am I to come back here?’

  Kilborn started to smile, while McStuart coughed.

  ‘Well,’ said McStuart. ‘That’s the thing.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Rekka. ‘Organizational restructuring, right?’

  ‘There’s some long-term redistribution of responsibilities coming up.’ Kilborn looked at McStuart, then back at Rekka. ‘That’s corporate bullshit-ese for winding things down in some places, and cranking things up elsewhere. Being posted to Singapore for the foreseeable future will do your career a lot of good.’

  ‘But offworld missions will still be part of that career?’

  ‘Of course. Flying out of, say, ShaanxiThree is no different than here.’

  Rekka pushed out a breath, deciding in that moment what she needed to get out of this meeting.

  Simon would do it better.

  But that was sort of the point: she was the one who temporarily had some kind of power.

  ‘If Simon were based in Singapore,’ she said, ‘or in the nearest Chinese station, that would make my decision much easier.’

  There was no need to say which Simon she referred to.

  Kilborn said: ‘He’s a good man. I’ll recommend him for any posting he wants.’

  She believed him; and she knew his recommendation would be enough to swing any transfer.

  ‘A good meeting, then,’ said McStuart. ‘Very good.’

  Considerably different to their last conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rekka. ‘Good.’

  But as she left the room, acid sourness swirled in her stomach. Because she was not used to corporate politics played that way? Or was it the thought of mixing with Haxigoji, the touch of their fur and the air filled with complex scents of communication?

  And Sharp, dying slice by slice as the blades came down.

  THIRTEEN

  MOLSIN, 2603 AD

  Tannier commandeered a room adjacent to the furthest medhall. Chairs morphed at his command, and he waved at Roger to sit. At the same time, one wall trembled and pulled apart, and a grizzle-headed man stepped in.

  ‘I’m Bendelhamer,’ was all he said to Roger, before nodding to Tannier. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Sir. Pilot Blackstone believes he knows the woman who stole the autodoc. What’s more, he says she’s implicated in the Fulgor Catastrophe.’

  Bendelhamer nodded.

  ‘Tell me your story, Pilot.’

  Roger told as much as he could without detailing Labyrinth or Admiralty conspiracies; but he did confess that his father had been an agent-in-place on Fulgor for decades. Neither Bendelhamer nor Tannier showed any reaction to the notion of spying: clearly they were, if not spies themselves, then senior police officers whose work bordered on the secret world.

  ‘This darkness,’ said Tannier finally. ‘It’s not something real, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Right,’ said Roger. ‘The visual aspect is a, what, artefact of perception, sort of thing. I’m detecting something but it’s not really light. Not an optical phenomenon.’

  Bendelhamer leaned his head forward.

  ‘And any Pilot would be able to detect this? Am I right?’

  Roger wanted to lie, because if they believed all Pilots saw what he did, it would lend weight to all he had told them.

  ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve had independent verification that some other Pilots can perceive the phenomenon, though not as easily.’

  Tannier waved one roughened, scarred hand.

  ‘This Helsen woman definitely stole an autodoc,’ he said. ‘If she set up this Luculenta Stargonier, entrapped her into becoming the start of this Anomaly, then she’s a criminal, possibly a war criminal.’

  ‘Meaning we don’t care about psychological phenomena as far as her legal status is concerned.’ Bendelhamer nodded. ‘That is clearly correct.’

  ‘I know you don’t have SatScan as such,’ said Roger. ‘But shouldn’t you have tracked her down via internal surveillance by now? That’s not an accusation. I just don’t understand.’

  Tannier’s face, battered by the years, somehow made his smile look genuine.

  ‘“A surveilled society is a safe society.” Isn’t that what they used to say on Fulgor?’

  The past tense was a judgement.

  ‘Used to,’ said Roger. ‘I suppose they’re sort of safe now, as components of a global organism. Just not human.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tannier. ‘But here we have a concept called privacy, as you might have noticed.’

  ‘Er … Surely not for you people. Not for official business.’

  ‘We have far fewer restrictions.’ This was Bendelhamer. ‘But a less unified surveillance architecture which is marginally easier to slip through, though it requires enormous expertise, even so.’

  ‘Helsen’s a bitch,’ said Roger, ‘but she isn’t stupid.’

  Then he stopped, looked around the room – it retained the look and feel of the med-halls outside – and added: ‘Why would she steal an autodoc? Wouldn’t it have been easier to go to ground quietly?’

  Bendelhamer and Tannier glanced at each other, perhaps because of the jargon – go to ground – or perhaps due to other factors.

  ‘That particular model,’ said Tannier, ‘allows reworking of DNA all the way through.’

  ‘Why would she want that?’

  ‘Possibly to avoid surveillance,’ said Bendelhamer. ‘But we’re not as unsophisticated as you might think, Pilot.’

  ‘Call me Roger. Your quickglass tech is far beyond anything Fulgor ever produced, and I’m aware of that.’

  The two men nodded.

  ‘What will you do now?’ asked Tannier. ‘Go back to Leeja Rigelle’s apartment?’

  So much for privacy laws.

  ‘I guess so,’ he said.

  Roger was halfway along a crowded gallery when his tu-ring flared, and a private holo unfurled in his smartlenses, the narrow-collimation audio surrounded by anti-sound. He backed up against a quickglass buttress, out of the flow of people.

  ‘I tried pinging you,’ said Jed, ‘but you were still hiding away somewhere shielded. That was against instructions, mate – trying to contact you, I mean – but I’d have got you offworld if I could.’

  It was a recorded, non-interactive message, as before.

  Against instructions?

  In the holo, Jed looked frustrated, and his voice was tight.

  ‘They’ve declared quarantine. Molsin’s powers-that-be are receiving notification that no Pilot ships will be visiting the planet. They’re not giving a reason, not in actual clear speech, but there’s something about “recent events concerning a new arrival” that points at what’s-her-name, Helsen.’

  Had Tannier and Bendelhamer known of this? Or were they only just learning of the quarantine themselves?

  ‘Check the auth-codes, appended,’ Jed added. ‘We’re leaving you funds to live on.’

  The message had been sent while Roger was in the medhalls, not Leeja’s place. He was going to have to change his tu-ring to warn of loss of contact, a condition that on Fulgor had been inconceivable.

  ‘I’m really sorry, mate. I’ll be back for you as soon as I can, right? Shit. Take it easy.’

  The holo winked out.

  ‘Shit is right,’ said Roger.

>   He went to the great reception hall where they had offloaded the med-drones from Jed’s ship. No one was there, apart from him: tiny in the huge, echoing space. Insignificant and lost.

  Cut off from Pilotkind.

  From her, growing so fast in Ascension Annexe.

  What am I supposed to do?

  But the notion of caring, benevolent authority was no longer relevant. He did not need anyone to tell him what to do, to give him a purpose.

  Not while Helsen was free.

  Leeja smiled at him, her chin dipped, her eyes alight.

  ‘Come in, lover.’

  The door flowed shut behind him.

  At some point in the night, they were awake together. Leeja touched his lower lip.

  ‘You said her name, darling. In your sleep. Your girl from Fulgor.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Earlier, he had told Leeja that his friend from Fulgor no longer knew him, thanks to medical science.

  ‘I’m not going to see her,’ he added. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Mm.’ Leeja wriggled, put her hand on his stomach. ‘And is she beautiful?’

  ‘She’s in the past.’

  Leeja kissed his earlobe.

  ‘But is she beautiful, this Gavi?’

  ‘She— What?’

  ‘What do I have to do so it’s my name you moan when you’re asleep?’

  He rolled on top of her.

  So warm, soft and exciting.

  ‘I’m not sleepy,’ he said.

  They rode to the stars once more.

  FOURTEEN

  EARTH, 1941 AD

  Gavriela rode in a train compartment whose other occupants – two men in uniform, two in heavy tweed overcoats and three-piece suits – nodded as politeness dictated, but conversed only in small, meaningless bursts during the entire journey. At Paddington, she felt nervous as she walked along the platform while the blackness of the engine loomed, steam banked overhead, and pigeons swooped amid metallic echoes bouncing from the steel-arched ceiling.

  The ticket-inspector, old and efficient, stood at the black-rubber barrier, one thumb tucked in his waistcoat pocket as he checked each traveller in turn. He nodded at Gavriela’s travel warrant, and gave her a kind smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed to say.

  Her body wanted to collapse concertina-like, folding at hips and knees; but she used force of will to walk on, and a train-whistle sounded as her head began to clear.

  Checking tickets, that’s all.

  The Gestapo had no power in England, at least not yet.

  Frank had arranged the warrant, at her inveigling. Her excuse was a desire to talk to the code-makers at SOE, to get another perspective on the more intractable signals passing through Hut 27. What’s more, she had managed to obtain a day’s leave, so that she did not have to report to Baker Street until Friday, while tomorrow she had free rein.

  THE DARKNESS COMMMANDS THAT YOU MEET THE EAGLE AT?? O’CLOCK THURSDAY IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE

  Yesterday, she had peeked at every intercept she could, trying to find another signal with the EAVI prefix, or anything else that might suggest a message from the same source. There had been nothing, no extra data: therefore no chance of deciphering the two-digit time.

  I can’t do this.

  But she had to, because the clunky German content of the message implied an English agent composing it. If she were sure that it was Germans meeting in Trafalgar, she could have bluffed her way into decrypting the message in full view, showing it to the team, and getting Frank to make a phone call. As it was, the people at the rendezvous could be anybody, possibly part of the British establishment and above suspicion.

  This was a machination of the darkness, not the German war machine. Even with all she had seen years before, it would have been delusional to believe a strange power was intimately directing the actions of key Nazis. The reality was subtler, the shared visions of a glorious, blood-soaked future arising more from known insanity and the contagion of mob psychology than from unknown forces. But a tiny deflection, applied in a timely manner, can bring about a massive change in trajectory over an extended duration. Poincaré had pointed that out, several years before Gavriela’s birth, in his papers on dynamical systems.

  And a bullet is such a small object.

  That was what scared her: not the travel arrangements, which were all in order – alles in Ordnung, such a Teutonic concept, more than the sum of its words – but the possibility that someone might notice the weight of her handbag, and ask her to open it. She had tried to fabricate cover stories to justify carrying a loaded Webley; but all of them sounded in her mind like the desperate, lightweight lies of a guilty child.

  A revolver has only one purpose, after all.

  The boarding-house room in Swiss Cottage was comfortable enough, but sleep came in short, incomplete bursts. No one knocked on the front door, no constables demanding she accompany them to the station; but someone must have noticed the gap in the display case at Bletchley. She would have preferred to raid the armoury proper, but it was guarded always. She had settled for Frank Longfield-Jones’ firearms-and-fishing-rod collection, on display in the snooker room at the mansion house.

  At dawn she left, bundled up in coat, headscarf and gloves, the Webley in her handbag. From the Tube station she caught a southbound train, heading for the West End. Two of the stations she passed through bore the chaotic signs of use during the night: lost blankets and general detritus. The people who had sheltered from the bombs were gone, back above ground. She wondered how many had found their homes destroyed, their pets killed or lost, or their neighbours dead.

  At Trafalgar Square, she worked out where to watch from: the area between Charing Cross Station and St Martin-in-the-Fields. The square itself, with the neo-classical National Gallery to the north, had the same imperial sensibility as the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, even the Reichstag: not a comparison to win her favour, should she ever share it.

  And so her long day of watching began.

  The station’s proximity was useful, along with the subterranean lavatories; but every time she gave in and took a break, she came back wondering if she had missed everything. On three occasions, she fell in with small groups of wives and girlfriends waiting for men to arrive home on leave, and joined in the chat with her fictitious tale of a husband due home today, but not knowing the time of his train. Once, she made sure a policeman overheard the story. It helped that her gloves hid the absence of a wedding-ring.

  When darkness – the ordinary absence of daylight – settled over the open square, she was worried as her presence became more likely to attract police attention. But a night-time meeting made sense, so she forced herself to remain in place, watching.

  Finally, shivers of that other darkness manifested across the road, somewhere close to one of the black lion statues.

  I have to do this.

  She wanted to pee, but that was impossible. She wanted her hands to stop shaking, and that was not happening either. Still she walked across the road, reached the steps – slowly, slowly in the blackout with only a hint of moon – down to the level of the square proper. The handbag clasp opened with an unexpected snap.

  A palsy took over her entire body.

  ‘—that?’ a voice muttered.

  A vague sense of two men searching the darkened square.

  Over there.

  The revolver felt so massive. She crouched down, placed her handbag on the flagstones, and rose with both hands trying to keep the Webley aimed.

  A faint hint of nine awful notes on the air.

  I’ve got you both.

  But the barrel was shaking – small deflections, big trajectory changes, so forth – which meant she had to get closer. Trying to be soundless, she advanced.

  ‘There!’ yelled one of her targets.

  ‘I see—’

  Then metallic whistles sounded on all sides, torch beams swung through the air, and a leather-gloved hand reached over Gavriela
’s shoulder and fastened on the revolver, while her insides dissolved in the acid of fear, reality swirling around her.

  ‘I’ll take that, old girl. You must be freezing.’

  Rupert Forrester smiled at her, his breath steaming white by torchlight. Twenty policemen or more were converging on the enemy: two strangers, who dropped their guns and put up their hands even before the command.

  ‘Bloody risky night to be a brass monkey,’ Rupert added. ‘So a nice hot cup of tea would be in order, don’t you think?’

  FIFTEEN

  MOLSIN, 2603 AD

  The concept of a single amateur outguessing the authorities to apprehend a criminal, so facile, ground away at Roger’s confidence. What he had going for him was his ability to perceive some resonance – something – from Helsen; but it was nothing he could replicate for others to use, or use himself at long distance. Barbour was an entire sky-city, and he could wander it for years and still not lay eyes on any given inhabitant.

  Especially if she was avoiding him.

  From the authorities’ viewpoint, their target’s appearance was unknown, likewise all the markers – such as DNA traces or neural clique configurations – normally used for suspect identification. At least, if Roger had understood Tannier and Bendelhamer correctly, that was why Helsen had stolen the autodoc: to give herself a new identity, all the way down to her molecules.

  Bitch.

  And the man who had been with her on Fulgor – were there two of them here, looking to replicate the Fulgor Catastrophe on Molsin? Roger walked through the halls and galleries of Barbour at random, trying to notice everything while despairing of the probabilities, with not even a halfway decent strategy for searching.

  What is she after?

  Assume Helsen’s objective was to create a second Anomaly, or an extension of the first. (And that was an assumption: perhaps she planned to live out her days in hiding, her life’s goal accomplished.) On Fulgor, the genesis had been a rogue Luculenta attacking her peers in Skein. On Molsin, neither concept – Luculenti or Skein – applied. Perhaps Tannier’s people had some notion of a local equivalent, some route by which a nascent Anomaly might attack. They must be smart enough, and have resources whose strength he could not gauge; but they would have no reason to share their thoughts with him.