‘I guess.’
‘And look, maybe those personal things you found? I mean…it's not weird stuff is it? Gross stuff? Tips of fingers! Organs?'
'No…no, no. Just ID tags, one or two personal possessions. Private things.'
Jez cocked her head. 'Right. So, maybe Gray or Shelby put those possessions down there as a kind of respect thing? To ‘honour fallen comrades’ type of deal?’
Ellie nodded. Perhaps. The room had been dark and creepy and it was quite possible she’d let her imagination run away with her.
‘You know what?’ said Jez. ‘I kinda like the idea that maybe Shelby or Gray just took those personal things down there to, I don’t know, make a special ‘memory place’ for them.’
She let go of Ellie’s shoulders and sat back. The bench creaked. ‘That’s kinda nice.’ She smiled. ‘Awww. To think one of them, or both of them has a nice soft, squishy, side to them.’
She meant ‘sentimental’. Ellie doubted Jez had ever spoken that word, or even knew how to spell it. It wasn’t her kind of vocabulary.
‘Maybe.’
‘Look, Ellie…if either of them were weirdos, or pervos, or murderers, don’t you think we’d know that by now?’ She smiled. ‘As far as I can see, Shelby would be quite happy for us to leave him to his animals and battles at the earliest convenience. And Gray?’ She shrugged. ‘He’s just a laid-back techie who likes to party a little. He’s totally harmless.’ Jez shrugged. ‘And apparently a bit of a softy too…if that room was his idea. I might just ask him about it.’
‘No. Don’t.’
‘Why not?’
The room had been unmarked. Hidden away. Clearly, it was meant to be a private, if not a secret, place.
‘Maybe you’re right. It’s a special memorial. Somewhere to remember absent colleagues. So…they might be really, really, annoyed with me if they knew I’d just blundered on in there? Right?’
Jez pursed her lips, giving it a moment’s thought. ‘I suppose.’
‘So, can you not tell either of them I found it then?’
'S'pose.'
'No. Please….promise. Promise me you won't go asking Gray about it. I think he doesn't like me that much already.'
'Oh,' she waggled her hand, 'he thinks you're alright. Crazy about me though.'
'Oh right, let's make this all about you, again.'
Jez laughed. 'Look, limp-chik….I won't mention it. Promise.'
‘But let’s also not forget it’s there.’
Jez looked puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘Because we don’t really know them, Jez. Not really.’
We’re alone. We’re entirely at their mercy…they’ve been isolated for ten years in a mini-universe in which they have God-like powers…to create, to destroy, to kill even; to do as they wish. She wanted to say all those things to Jez, but instead she hunched her shoulders.
‘I guess I just got too nosey.’ She turned to her friend. ‘Anyway, we can't get too attached to this place, okay?’
‘This has got to be the coolest place to hide in the system!’
‘To hide…yes. For now. But we can’t stay here forever.’
Jez rolled her eyes as she considered that, then eventually nodded. 'well obviously, not forever.'
‘We’ll only be truly safe once we’re out of this system. Until then…we’re still in a box. A big system-sized box, yes…but still trapped.’
CHAPTER 5
World Three looked like a set of building blocks, like a vast child’s play set. She watched the gradually developing landscape from the doorway of the biome. In some places the ground was nearing completion and the blocks, uniformly grey and featureless, were being overlaid with more natural-looking undulations of soil. The place was alive with twitching movement. Everywhere she looked she could see hundreds, no…thousands, of machines with fine, spider-like legs, scuttling across the landscape. One hurried past her, almost stepping on the toe of her boot.
‘Eek!’ She stepped backwards.
‘Oh, good grief,’ sighed Shelby. ‘Don’t be such a girl. They’re quite harmless.’
‘They look like robot spiders!’
‘They’re Micro-Fabricators. We have about ten thousand of these units. All of them coordinated by the World Designer Application.’
‘Mother?’
‘She monitors the software, but the WDA is an autonomous application.’
Ellie watched as the spider hesitated where her foot had been planted. At the top of a small pale plastic cylindrical body - about nine inches high and half as many in diameter - a small lens glinted as it swivelled round towards her, looked her up and down, then apparently unimpressed by what it saw, carried on about its work.
She watched it scuttle across the ground towards an area that was yet to be covered. It hopped into a shallow square hole and began to eject a thick gel from the bottom of the cylinder, like toothpaste from a tube, it reminded her of a spider laying out webbing.
‘Basically, we’ve got the same principle going on here as we have going down on the fabrication deck. Each of those mobile units carries a small payload of raw carbon-based gel and is assigned a one meter grid block to build up. The gel in its raw form becomes the basic construction geometry…the grey blocks you can see everywhere. For other materials….the soil, the boulders, buildings….the gel is mixed inside their cylinders with other basic ingredients and extruded via one of their deployment nozzles.’
She could see the spider nearby had different sized holes at the bottom of its cylinder and fine pincers that were used to shape and mould the extruded gel.
‘They’ll work on a grid block until it matches the design specification given to them then get assigned a brand new one.’
‘And they can actually make living things?’
Shelby shook his head. ‘No, the plants and trees are just fakes. They sway, look, smell and feel like the real things, but they won’t grow or wither.’
‘But I thought the trees…’ she turned to look down the long straight passageway leading back to the central biome.
‘Oh, yes, those ones are one hundred percent real. They’ve all been grown from saplings and seeds. But here, since the landscapes are designed to be changed on a…’ he shrugged once again, that rueful if-things-had-turned-out-differently shrug that she’d grown used to. ‘…since the landscapes would have been changed on a regular basis, to meet the various client’s specifications, what’s the point of trying to grow a tree? When it has to pulled down again to meet the next client's wishes? Far more sensible to build a very convincing facsimile in just a few hours?’
‘Right, I see.’
The landscape’s rough geometry seemed to be taking the shape of a gentle valley with a rounded hilltop at either end. ‘So what’s this world going to be?’
‘Your classic two-player capture the flag template.’
She spread her hands. ‘Which means?’
Shelby rolled his eyes. ‘A defendable redoubt at either end, one for each player and a pretty basic combat arena between.’ He looked at her and sighed wearily. ‘We might insert some interesting terrain features in the middle.’
‘Like what?’
He turned his nose up at her and closed his eyes and let the lids flutter. ‘That would be cheating if I told you. Unlike Graham, I never, ever, cheat.’
She believed that. Believed that about him. He really didn't seem like the kind of person who could hold onto a dark secret.
CHAPTER 6
Shitting. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Deacon preferred to keep his swearing inside his head. He found it unpalatable when other people spat out coarse language like gobs of linguistic phlegm. It made them sound unintelligent and undisciplined; people unable to control themselves or retain any sense of dignity and decorum. Far better to throw around whatever gutter-language you knew inside your head, while remaining calm and looking in control on the outside. Appearance was everything.
Fucking shit, buggeration …and bu
ggering fucking hell.
‘Are you okay, Deacon?’
‘Perfectly fine Leonard.’
‘You look…distressed. And you were muttering something’
‘I’m perfectly fine, Lenny,’ he repeated calmly.
Jesus. They’ve sent someone. They’ve bloody well sent someone!
The Administration had contacted the Captain of the orbiting marine ship via sub-space resonance to pass on a message to Deacon that they were sending someone 'high up'. Which meant they weren’t happy with how things were going. Deacon knew all too well what happened to people that 'disappointed' the Administration's ruling council.
Leonard was still staring at him, unconvinced by his answer. 'You are not fine, Deacon. The veins on your forehead are sticking out.'
Leonard didn’t miss a goddamn thing and definitely sometimes didn't know when to shut up. 'The Administration have sent someone to help us,' he replied.
‘Do you know who?’ asked Leonard looking over at the ship.
'High up' meant one of the members of the Administration’s Ruling Council, There were eight of them, all of them well known across the entirety of Human Space. Elected from Congress, once every fifteen years, most of the current Ruling Council members were second-termers, which meant most of them had gotten used to at least two decades of being in charge, of being the most powerful people in Human Space. That, of course, made the whole lot of them, insufferably arrogant and difficult to deal with. Three women, five men, all in their seventies and eighties. Most of the men, happy to age gracefully, were silver-haired statesmen who allowed their faces to be broadcast without any post-video cosmetic filters applied. However one of them, the Secretary for Trade and Industry, Councillor Jenson Fforde II, was quite open and honest about the anti-ageing gene treatments he’d been having for the last twenty years. He’d managed to maintain the appearance of a man in his mid-forties despite pushing the top end of his seventh decade. But, it was Councillor Hayden, who had really excelled on that particular front. Rumours about the money she’d spent on cosmetic treatments over the decades were a running joke among the more anarchic holo-comedy shows. And yes…she was the one who'd been sent in the drop ship that had just descended from the marine cruiser in high orbit.
‘The Secretary for Defence,’ replied Deacon.
‘Lorna Hayden?!’
‘Yes.’
Leonard’s eyes suddenly rounded. ‘She scares me.’
‘She scares everyone, Lenny.’
One of the marine ship’s ochre-coloured orbital drop ships had gently put down onto a black landing pad ten minutes ago. The dust had settled and they'd patiently been watching it and the multicoloured chequer board of sun-baked landing pads outside, shimmering in the morning sun.
Councillor Lorna Hayden was taking her time emerging from the craft.
A passenger tractor was waiting beside the drop ship’s exit ramp, and two lines of marines in ceremonial whites waited to salute her, their regimental flag snapping and fluttering in the dusty morning thermals. Every now and then, Deacon could see their commanding officer giving permission for his men to sip air from the O2 masks dangling around their necks.
It was the very depiction of ruling arrogance. Inside the drop ship, Councillor Hayden was probably deliberately taking her time finishing a cup of mint tea before she deigned to set foot outside on this grubby world. Meanwhile, outside, her honour guard of marines stood to attention in their smartest uniforms, risking passing out from oxygen starvation and brain damage, or heat stroke, just so they could be ready to salute her when she bothered to emerge.
What a prize bitch.
The sun had risen an our ago, it looked unpleasantly hot out there. Finally, Deacon glimpsed movement at the very top of the exit ramp. Half a dozen men and women in dark, one-strip, form-hugging suits, wearing flip down, sun-reflective eye-huds.
Her personal security detachment.
They hustled down to the bottom of the ramp and fanned out, one heading over to the passenger tractor, opening the rear hatch and checking the interior.
Then two more pairs of legs emerged into the sunlight. A woman and a man both pulling wheelie bags behind them. They looked like a young business couple, smartly, very expensively dressed. Deacon suspected those were her personal secretary and her personal dietician. Finally, behind them, Councillor Hayden emerged.
‘Woah,’ gulped Leonard.
She was wearing a pastel-pink coloured pencil skirt, that hugged her knees impractically together and high heeled ankle boots in the same colour. She wore a more conservative coloured, charcoal, matador jacket with a tapered waist and glistening ribbed carapace shoulder pads. Her trademark long, flowing fox-red hair was, for once, pulled back sensibly into a I’m-here-to-kick-someone's-ass ponytail.
‘She's beautiful! She looks like a viddee-star!’
‘She’s vain, Leonard. Incredibly vain. That's a weakness. She dresses smartly to hide insecurities. A vain and powerful woman, that’s not a good combination, trust me.’
Leonard turned to look at him. ‘You dress really smart too.’
‘That’s entirely different. I’m not vain. I just choose not to look like a pleb.’
Councillor Hayden took her time taking little steps down the ramp and as the two lines of marines presented arms in one crisp movement she flapped a casual hand of acknowledgement at them before stooping and stepping, reluctantly, into the dark and air conditioner-cool interior of the pad-tractor.
Her secretary and valet and one of the security men stepped in after her, pulled the door down and the tractor began to rumble across the tarmac towards the port building.
Deacon sucked in a deep breath. Here we bloody well go.
The sent-ahead word was that Councillor Lorna Hayden wanted an update on the situation from Deacon as soon as she landed on Harpers Reach.
*
The room was an interview room used by the immigration officials. One table, two hard orange plastex seats and a CCTV unit that had been left unplugged. (From time to time the officials preferred to interview immigrants with their bare knuckles; particularly Rebornist preachers). Deacon had been instructed by one of her humourless security officers to take a seat in this interview room and wait for her. He’d had enough waiting time to grow tediously familiar with the scuffed walls, the dog-eared posters warning about ‘Space Herpes’ and STDs, the scratches of graffiti and faint spots of lazily scrubbed-off blood.
He was kept waiting for nearly half an hour before the door finally snapped open and Councillor Hayden stepped into the room, holding a cup and saucer in one hand. The door was closed behind her. She took small steps across the tiny room, set her cup and saucer down on the table, checked the chair, and brushed at the seat before easing herself slowly down onto it, not once making eye contact with him.
‘Councillor Hayden,’ started Deacon, ‘you really didn’t need to come all the way out to the Seventh Veil.’
She ignored him as she picked her cup up daintily, her little finger extended like a radio antenna. She tested the heat of her tea with a cautious sip then set it back down again.
She looked sternly at him. The very first indication that she was even aware he was sitting there right in front of her. ‘Oh, but I did. It appears you’ve gone and lost Mason’s little monster.’
‘She’s bottled up in this system. She’s as good as imprisoned.’
‘Imprisoned?’ Hayden almost managed a smile. Almost. ‘A pretty big prison cell don’t you think? A whole system? How many planets? How many people? How many ships? How many bolt holes? Lots of places to hide, I imagine.’
‘While she’s lying low, she’s not making matters any worse.’ Deacon winced inside; a pretty dumb thing for him to say and Hayden was going to jump right on that.
‘Deacon, we have a whole system quarantined. Apart from the detrimental affect that has on cross-system economic patterns, we’re having to divert a lot of military boots this way to enforce this lock down of yours
.’
‘I understand.’
‘I wonder if you do. We’ve got a lot of other ‘hotspots’ to deal with right now.’
‘Yes, I appreciate manpower is stretched thin. But the Administration did authorise the quarantine.’
‘You gave us little choice in the matter.' She set her cup down and leant forward. 'So, I'm intrigued.'
'Councillor?
'How the hell did you manage to identify the precise person…I believe it’s a girl, nineteen years of age, correct?’
‘Correct.’
‘…identify this teenage girl then, and then….lose her?’
‘One of my hired guns was bought. I managed to zero in on her, dammit, we had her…but the duplicitous bastard let her escape.’
‘Yes, I read your report on the flight over. So you seem quite certain that it’s not just Mason but the Awoken who are behind this?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
Councillor Hayden picked up her cup again. Deacon watched her full lips as she sipped her tea. Up close to her now, closer than he'd ever been, he could see the faintest of fine lines around her eyes, beneath her jaw. Her skin wasn't the porcelain smooth of genuine youth…but as close as damn, as close as money and gene-therapy could buy. An eighty-six year old woman (public domain data, that…although Deacon guessed she'd give anything to redact her birth date from it), she looked like a health-conscious twenty-nine year old.
‘I knew Edward Mason. I worked with him forty years ago on restructuring the DGA. He never struck me as the religious type.’
‘He isn’t. I suspect he’s using the Awoken to help him with whatever he's planning.’
‘His plan? Do you have any idea what his ‘plan’ is yet?’
‘The girl’s DNA contains some kind of a dormant pathogen. That much we’ve worked out from the tissue samples. But as to what it is supposed to do, who knows?’ He spread his hands and smiled. ‘Perhaps it’s some kind of believe-in-God virus.’
He said that half jokingly. Hayden didn’t laugh though.
‘You say that, Deacon, but religion is like a damned virus. An ideological virus. And it’s spreading. The last thing we need right now is some psychological bio-weapon to make matters worse, that, or worse. In your report Deacon, you suggested that she's being 'groomed' to be some sort of a religious figurehead.’