Open Channel to SelfCores. Get me a match up for this, would you? she asked silently. It was important she knew what he had chosen for her.
She looked back to the card, its bold script with over-large loops. She could remember him perfecting his writing, sitting at a narrow wooden table in her island bungalow, the sea swishing on the beach outside, his brow furrowed in concentration.
And the flower, the flower was the sealer. Royan adored flowers, and she always associated them with him, ever since the day when they finally met in the flesh.
Access Royan Recovery. She had node referenced the memory because she knew it would always be special, wanting to guard the details from entropic decay down the years.
Six of them had walked into the Mucklands Wood estate that afternoon fifteen years ago, all of them wearing English Army uniforms. Morgan Walshaw, Event Horizon’s security chief at the time, who was quietly furious with her. It was the first (and last) time she had ever defied him over her own safety. Greg Mandel, who was as close to Royan as she was, and who’d agreed to lead them as soon as he’d heard she was going in. Rachel, who was her bodyguard back then, and two extra hardliners, John Lees and Martyn Oakly.
Mucklands Wood was the home of the Trinities, a bleak tower block housing estate which the city council had thrown up in the first couple of years after the Fens flooded. It stood on the high ground to the west of the A15, looking down on Walton where the Blackshirts were based. Two mortal enemies, separated by a single strand of melting tarmac and the luckless residential district of Bretton.
Rescuing Royan was more than a debt. Two years before, he had saved Philip Evans from a virus that PSP leftovers had squirted into the NN core. One of the best hackers on the circuit, he had written an antithesis which purged the virus. He had never asked for payment. A strange kind of bond had developed between them afterwards. Both of them powers in their respective fields, both feared, both near friendless, both wildly different. The attraction/fascination was inevitable, affection wasn’t, but it had come nevertheless. There was nothing sexual about the relationship, given the circumstances there couldn’t be. Neither of them ever expected to meet in the flesh. But the association was mutually rewarding. Royan had helped Julia safeguard Event Horizon’s confidential commercial data from his peers on the circuit, while Julia supplied the Trinities with weapons to continue their fight against the Blackshirts. She hated the Blackshirts almost as much as Royan did.
But only now was she seeing the real cost of sponsoring the Trinities. Nothing like the intellectual exercise of arranging shipments through Clifford Jepson. An action whose only reaction was the occasional item on the evening newscasts. She didn’t have distance between her and the Trinities any more. Mucklands Wood wasn’t the adventure-excitement she had expected, the little scary thrill of visiting the darkside. This was raw-nerve fear.
The struggle was all over now. There were no more Trinities, no more Blackshirts. Fires still burnt in both districts, sending up pillars of thick oily smoke to merge with the low bank of smog occluding the sky above the city. Half a squadron of Army tilt-fans orbited the scene slowly, alert for any more trouble.
Peterborough’s usual dynamic sparkle had vanished, shops closed, factories shut. The city’s frightened, shocked citizens were barricaded in their homes, waiting for the all-clear to sound. Both sets of protagonists had known this was the last time, the showdown, they hadn’t held back.
Julia walked over hard-packed limestone. The whole estate was a barren wasteland. There were no trees or shrubs, even weeds were scarce; a greasy blue-grey moss slimed the brick walls of abandoned roofless employment workshops. The Trinities symbol was sprayed everywhere, raw and challenging, a closed fist gripping a thorn cross, blood dripping.
Two of the estate’s high-rise blocks had been razed in the battle, toppling over after a barrage of anti-tank missiles had blown out the bottom floors. Julia’s little group threaded its way past one, a long mound of broken twisted rubble, with metal girders sticking out at low angles. Squaddies picked their way over it gingerly, helping city firemen with their thermal-imaging sensors. Futile gesture really. She could see pieces of smashed furniture crushed between the jagged slabs of concrete, torn strips of brightly coloured cloth flapping limply, splinters of glass everywhere, dust thick in the air. A long row of bodies lay at the foot of the tower, covered in blankets. Some had dark wet stains.
Morgan Walshaw looked at her as they marched past. But she forced herself into an expression of grim endurance, and never broke stride.
A two-man patrol halted them. The squaddies in their dark-grey combat leathers and equipment webs didn’t even seem human. Sinister cyborg figures cradling stub-barrelled McMillan electromagnetic rifles, bulbous photon-amp lenses giving their helmet visors an insect appearance, there wasn’t a square centimetre of skin visible. She couldn’t understand half of the gear modules clipped to their webs, and didn’t bother consulting her nodes. She didn’t want to know. All she’d come for was Royan.
Greg and Morgan Walshaw exchanged a few words, and the squaddies waved them on. They had been guarding the approach to a field hospital, three inflated hemispheres of olive-green plastic. Land Rovers and ambulances stood outside, orderlies hurrying between the bloody figures lying on stretchers. The empty white plastic wrappers of disposable first aid modules littered the ground; the oddest impression of the day, a dusting of giant snowflakes.
For the first time, Julia heard the sounds of the aftermath. The moans and screams of the wounded. Guilt sent icy spikes into her belly.
‘Morgan,’ she said in a small voice.
He glanced back at her, and she saw the genuine worry in his face. Despite the forty years between them, she had always considered him one of her closest friends.
‘What?’ he asked. There was an edge in his voice. He was ex-military himself. She wondered, belatedly, what sort of memories their visit must be raking up.
‘I’d like to do something for the survivors. They’ll need proper medical treatment after the Army triage. Lawyers too, probably.’
‘I’ll get on to it when we’re finished here.’ He dropped back to walk beside her. ‘You holding out all right?’
‘I’ll manage.’
His arm went round her shoulder, giving her a quick comforting shake.
‘Tell you, this is the one,’ Greg said over his shoulder. He was indicating the high-rise block straight ahead.
It was identical to all the others left standing. Twenty storeys high, covered in a scale of slate-grey low-efficiency solar cell panels. Most of its windows had blown out. Fires had been extinguished on several floors, she could see the soot stains, like black flames, rising out of the broken windows, surrounding solar panels had melted and buckled from the heat.
‘Been one hell of a scrap here,’ Greg muttered.
The burnt-out wreckage of an old-style assault helicopter was strewn on the ground fifty metres from the tower. She stared at it, bewildered. Assault helicopters? In a gang war? Three military microlights were crumpled on the limestone around it, wing membranes shredded by laser fire.
There were several squaddies on sentry duty outside the tower, under the command of a young lieutenant who was waiting for them near the entrance. An intelligence officer, Julia knew; the Minister of Defence had assured her the lieutenant would be briefed about the need for total security.
The lieutenant snapped off a salute to Greg, then his eyes widened when he saw the Mindstar Brigade badge on Greg’s shoulder. If anything he became even stiffer. Julia wondered what he would do if she lifted up her own silvered vizor to let him see who she was.
Greg returned the salute.
‘Nobody has entered the tower since the firing stopped, Captain,’ the lieutenant said. ‘But apparently some of the Blackshirts penetrated it on the first day. There was a lot of fighting around here, they seemed to think it was important. Do you want my squad to check it out?’
Morgan Walshaw glanced up
at the blank grey cliff in front of them. ‘No, thank you. Give us forty-five minutes. Then you can commence a standard securement procedure.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The lieutenant had found the brigadier’s insignia on Morgan Walshaw’s uniform.
‘At ease, lieutenant,’ Morgan Walshaw said mildly.
Greg led them into the tower, leaving the lieutenant behind outside. He moved like a sleepwaker, eyes barely open. Julia knew he was using his bioware gland, neurohormones pumping into his brain to stimulate his psi faculty, espersense washing through the tower to detect other minds, seeing if anyone was lying in ambush. He always said he couldn’t read individual thoughts, just emotional composition, but Julia never managed to feel convinced. His presence always exacerbated her guilt. Just knowing he could see it lurking in her mind made her concentrate more on the incidents she was ashamed over – losing her temper with one of Wilholm’s domestic staff yesterday, twisting Morgan Walshaw’s arm to come to Mucklands, the two boys she was currently stringing along – running loose in her mind and bloating the original emotion out of all proportion. An unstoppable upward spiral.
The inside of the tower was stark. Bullet craters riddled the entrance hall walls, none of the biolum panels were on. A titan had kicked in the two lift doors, warping and tearing the buffed metal. The shafts beyond were impenetrably black.
‘Through here,’ Greg said reluctantly. He put his shoulder to the stairwell door. John Lees and Martyn Oakly had to lend a hand before it finally juddered open wide enough for them to slip through.
There was a jumble of furniture behind it, and two bodies: Trinities, lads in their late teens. She looked away quickly. They had been trying to get out, pulling at the pile of furniture. Their backs were mottled with laser burns.
By the time they reached the eleventh floor, Julia was sweating hard inside the heavy uniform, her breath coming in deep gulps. Nobody else was complaining, not even Morgan Walshaw who was over sixty, so she kept quiet. But he could see the difference between being genuinely fit like the hardliners, and her own condition, which was arrived at by following a Hollywood celebrity’s routine to keep her belly flat and her bottom thin. It was damn embarrassing; she was the youngest of the group.
Greg held an arm up for silence, he pointed to the door which opened on to the corridor. ‘Someone a couple of metres inside. They’re in a lot of pain, but conscious.’
‘What do you want to do?’ Morgan Walshaw asked.
‘Bad tactics to leave a possible hostile covering your escape route.’
Morgan Walshaw grunted agreement, and signalled John Lees forwards. The hardliner drew his Uzi hand laser and flattened himself against the wall by the door. Greg tested the door handle, then nodded once, and pulled the door open. John Lees went through the gap with a quick professional twist.
Julia was always amazed by how fast her bodyguards could move. It was as if they had two sets of reactions, one for everyday use, and accelerated reflexes for combat situations. One time, she had asked Morgan Walshaw if it was drugs, but he’d just laughed annoyingly and said no, it was controlled fear.
‘All clear,’ John Lees called.
It was a boy in his early twenties, dressed in a poor copy of Army combat leathers. He was sitting with his back propped against the wall, helmet off. Both his legs were broken, the leather trousers ripped. A thick band of analgesic foam had been sprayed over his thighs. Blood covered the concrete floor beneath him. His face was chalk white, covered in sweat, he was shivering violently.
‘A Blackshirt,’ Greg said in a toneless voice.
The boy’s eyes met Julia’s, blank with incomprehension. He was the same age as Patrick Browning, one of her current lovers. She had never been so close to one of her sworn enemies before. Blackshirt firebombing was a regular event at her Peterborough factories, the cost of additional security and insurance premiums was a real curse.
‘Don’t hurt him,’ she said automatically.
The boy continued his compulsive stare.
‘Your lucky day,’ Greg told him blandly. ‘I’ve gone up against a lot of your mates in my time.’ He pressed an infuser tube on the boy’s neck, and his head lolled forwards.
‘The Army will pick him up when they comb the tower,’ Morgan Walshaw said. ‘He ought to live.’
They carried on up the stairs to the twentieth floor. Greg halted at the door which opened into the central corridor, his eyes fully closed. Julia could hear her heart yammering. Rachel caught her eye, and winked encouragement.
‘Is he alive?’ Julia asked.
Greg’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Yeah.’
Julia let out a sob of relief. This hardly seemed real any more, it was so far outside her usual life. She thought she would feel anticipation, but there was only a sense of shame and despair. It had taken so many deaths to bring about this moment, mostly people her own age, denied any sort of future, good or bad. And all for an indecisive battle in a war which had ended four years ago. None of this had been strategic, it was basic animal blood-lust.
The corridor was a mess. There were no windows, the biolum strip had been smashed. Greg and Martyn Oakly took out powerful torches.
There was something five metres down the corridor, an irregular hump. At first she thought one of the tower’s residents had dropped a big bag of kitchen rubbish, there was a damp meaty smell in the air. Then she saw the ceiling above had cracked open; three smooth dark composite cones poked down out of the gap. A battered helmet lay on the floor, alongside a couple of ammunition clips, and a hand. It still had a watch round the wrist.
Julia vomited violently.
The next minute was a blur. Rachel Griffith was holding on to her as she trembled. Everyone else gathered round, faces sympathetic. She didn’t want that sympathy. She was angry with herself for being so weak. Embarrassed for showing it so publicly. She should never have come, it was stupid trying to be this macho. Morgan Walshaw had been right, which made her more angry.
‘You OK?’ Rachel Griffith asked.
‘Yes.’ She nodded dumbly. ‘Sorry.’
Rachel winked again.
Bloody annoying.
Julia got a grip on herself.
Greg turned the handle of room 206, the door opened smoothly. There was a hall narrower than the corridor outside, then they were in Royan’s room.
That was when she saw the flowers. It was so unexpected she barely noticed the rest of the fittings. Half of the room was given over to red clay troughs of flowering plants. She recognized some – orchids, fuchsias, ipomoeas, lilies, and petunias – a beautiful display, lucid colours, strong blooms. Not a dead leaf or withered petal among them. The plants were tended by little wheeled robots that looked like mobile scrap sculptures, the junked innards of a hundred different household appliances bolted together by a problem five-year-old. But the clippers, hoses, and trowel blades they brandished hung limply. For some inane reason she would have liked to see them in action.
Past the plant troughs a wall had been covered by a stack of ancient vacuum-tube television screens, taken out of their cabinets and slotted into a metal framework. Julia ducked round hanging baskets of nasturtiums and Busy Lizzies. She saw a big workbench with bulky waldos on either side of it. The kind of ’ware module stacks she was familiar with from Event Horizon’s experimental laboratories took up half of the available floor space.
A camera on a metal tripod tracked her movements. Its fibre-optic cables were plugged into the black modem balls filling Royan’s eyesockets. He sat in a nineteen-fifties vintage dentist’s chair in the middle of the room.
Julia smiled softly at him. She knew what to expect, Greg had told her several times. When he was fifteen, Royan was a committed Trinities hothead, taking part in raids on PSP institutions, sabotaging council projects. Then one night, in the middle of a food riot organized by the Trinities, he wasn’t quite quick enough to escape a charge of People’s Constables. The Constables’ chosen weapon was a carbon monolattice bullwhip; wield
ed properly it could cut through an oak post three centimetres in diameter. After Royan had fallen, two of them set about him, hacking at his limbs, lashing his back open. Greg led a counter attack by the Trinities, hurling Molotovs at the People’s Constables. By the time he got to Royan, the boy’s arms and legs had been ruined, his skin, eyes, and larynx scorched by the flames.
Royan’s torso was corpulent, dressed in a food-stained T-shirt; his arms ended below the elbows; both legs were short stumps. Plastic cups were fitted over the end of each amputated limb, ganglion splices, from which bundles of fibre optic cables were attached, plugging him into the room’s ’ware stacks.
The bank of screens began to flicker with a laborious determination. The lime-green words that eventually materialized were a metre high, bisected by the rims of individual screens as they flowed from right to left.
JULIA. NOT YOU. NOT YOU HERE.
‘ ’Fraid so,’ she said lightly.
NEVER WANTED YOU TO COME. NOT TO SEE ME. SHAME SHAME SHAME. Royan’s torso began to judder as he rocked his shoulders, mouth parting to show blackened buck teeth.
Julia wished to God she could interface her nodes direct with his ’ware stacks here, they normally communicated direct through Event Horizon’s datanet. Speedy, uninhibited chatter on any subject they wanted, arguing, laughing, and never lying; it was almost telepathy. But this was painfully slow, and so horribly public. ‘The body is only a shell,’ Julia said. ‘I know what’s inside, remember?’
OH SHIT, A RIGHT SMART-ARSE.
‘Behave yourself,’ Greg said smartly.
HELLO, GREG. I KNEW YOU WOULD COME. GOING TO HAUL ME OUT OF THE FLAMES AGAIN?
‘Yeah.’
HIDE ME UNTIL THE ARMY HAS GONE.
‘No,’ Julia said. ‘It’s over, Royan.’
NEVER. THERE ARE STILL THOUSANDS OF PSP OUT THERE. I’LL FIND THEM, I’LL TRACK THEM DOWN. NO ONE ESCAPES FROM ME.
‘Enough!’ she stamped her foot. Tears suddenly blurred her vision. ‘It’s horrible outside. You Trinities and Blackshirts, all lying dead. They’re our age, Royan. They could have had real lives, gone to school, had children.’