The sniper had been in place for six days, waiting for the opportunity that must surely come. He ate self-heating rations, and performed his ablutions in plastic bags. He lay beside his gun, its muzzle not even protruding an inch through the camouflaged hole in the brickwork for fear that an Illyri scan might reveal its presence. The only light came through that hole, filtered by gauze. At night, he lay entirely in blackness. He enjoyed brief periods of sleep, but he seemed to have a sixth sense for movement in the target area, and came instantly awake when a figure entered his killing zone. His nest was a cleverly disguised crawl space, barely five feet wide and three feet high, above an existing attic in a building on the Royal Mile. It resembled a coffin of brick and wood, but the sniper was not one to suffer from claustrophobia. Neither did it ever enter his mind that he might survive his mission. Once the shooting began, they would seal off the area and come for him. It didn’t matter. They would find only his body—at the thought, he flicked his tongue over the cyanide capsule in his tooth—and beside it a picture of the sniper with a woman and two teenage boys, all gone now, all dead.
Early on the seventh morning came a burst of activity. The governor’s shuttle was being prepared for departure. Instinctively, the sniper controlled his breathing. He placed his right eye to the telescopic sight, and his finger under the guard, hovering barely millimeters above the trigger. Figures appeared in his scope, but they wore the black of Securitats or the uniform of the castle guards. None was the one whom he sought.
More movement. A glimpse of red. The Nairene Sister. And if she was present, then so too—
There! His finger touched the trigger. He prepared to release a breath, and with it would come the bullet, as though he himself were the weapon, and his mouth the muzzle.
A massive shock rippled through his body, turning his chest into a resonance chamber, and his heart burst before he could fire the shot. He briefly recognized the fact of his own dying, and welcomed it. He was only sorry that he had not managed to kill the target. It was his final thought as he was reunited at last with those whom he had lost.
In the attic space below, a hooded figure lowered a handheld pulse weapon. Its skin was slightly scarred below the hairline, and beside and beneath the chin, as though it wore an imperfectly fitted mask. The features had an eerie blankness, as if an expensive showroom dummy had somehow come to life, a consequence of the ProGen skin that had been applied to form a face, and then kept in a state of suppleness by regularly passing a small electric current through the base material. With the application of a little makeup, the blank effect largely disappeared, but there had been no time to apply it that morning. Even a delay of seconds would have resulted in the death of Lord Andrus.
The figure descended through the levels of the old building, slipping out through a window at the back just as the first rays of sunlight touched the skyline, and lost itself in the shadows. Had there been anyone to bear witness, they might have glimpsed what appeared to be a youthful Illyri female, smaller than average, with quick, lithe movements, wearing only thin, dark clothes despite the morning cold, for the sensations of cold and heat were simply not part of her programming. Curiously, though, she did feel a sense of regret at the sniper’s death, for she knew something of his history, and the reasons why he had volunteered for a mission that he knew could end only one way for him. Such an emotion was unequivocally not part of her programming. Neither were loyalty, attraction, hatred, or love—for she was a biomechanical organism, a Mech—and yet all had begun to manifest themselves. She was changing, developing.
In the Edinburgh chill, Meia shivered.
CHAPTER 35
They called it the Scourging of the Highlands. It was not the first such persecution of the Scots—Scotland’s history was marked with many instances of similar brutality over the years—but it was terrible in the degree of its ruthlessness. Houses were razed, their inhabitants left to watch them burn. Entire villages were wiped from the map, leaving only craters where communities had once stood. For the first time since the early days of the Illyri Conquest, refugees traveled the roads of Scotland in convoys of cars and trucks, and sometimes even on foot if the Illyri had chosen to compound their punishment by depriving them of their vehicles. They headed for the cities and the towns, where friends and relatives might be willing to put them up for a time until they could find new accommodation, new schools for their children, and new jobs if they were fortunate enough not to be blacklisted.
Blacklisting was another Illyri variation on an old conqueror’s trick: those suspected of sympathizing, if not actively conspiring, with the Resistance could be put on temporary “Denial of Employment” lists, which made it illegal for anyone to offer them work, paid or unpaid—for initially the Scots had tried to get around the lists by allowing people to take up voluntary positions and paying them in food, fuel, or shelter. Those citizens who had lived through the Second World War in Europe, or had fled the Nazis when they took similar measures against Jews, and homosexuals, and Gypsies, and union organizers, looked on the actions of the Illyri with bleak, angry eyes, reminded—as if any reminder was necessary—that history merely finds new ways to repeat old crimes. Swastikas began to appear on the walls of Illyri bases and the sides of their vehicles, and in one week in December alone, two Glasgow youths were shot dead by Illyri forces while engaged in such acts of defacement, and twenty others were injured, eight seriously. The result, hardly unexpectedly, was not a reduction but a sharp increase in the number of swastikas being painted, and an order from the Illyri rulers in Edinburgh that lethal force was not to be used against unarmed children. Since many Scottish youths routinely carried small knives, and even a stone could be considered a weapon, the order did nothing to reduce the number of shooting incidents.
The reason why the Illyri boot was being pressed so heavily to the Scottish throat could be summarized in just one word: Dundearg. At this Highland castle, now reduced to blackened ruins, a band of Resistance fighters had successfully annihilated the remnants of an Illyri strike force that had descended on the Highlands to rescue the high-ranking Illyri Grand Consul Gradus, and kill his Resistance captors. Instead, in a series of engagements, the Resistance left the remains of three Illyri heavy cruisers, two shuttles, and a still-untold number of Illyri and conscripted Galatean corpses scattered across the landscape. Among the dead was Sedulus, the European head of the Securitats, the Illyri’s hated security police.
The price of the victory at Dundearg, though, had proven high. Sedulus had a lover, Vena, who was also his underling, and upon his death she was promoted to his former position of marshal. Vena was now responsible for avenging his loss, a bereavement that was both professional and deeply personal to her. This, perhaps, explained some of the relish which she brought to the task of punishing the Scots for Dundearg. Vena was unnaturally cruel; some said that she had not been born in the normal way, but had eaten her way out of her mother’s womb.
But Vena had appointed another Illyri female, Cynna, to supervise in a hands-on fashion the crackdown on the Scots. If anything, Cynna was more vicious than her mistress, but lacked her intelligence. Still, it was useful for Vena to have someone like Cynna to do her dirty work. It meant that, where necessary, she could keep her hands clean, and pretend that the worst excesses of torture and killing had nothing to do with her. Cynna particularly favored strangulation as a form of execution. She was uncommonly strong, even for an Illyri, and had left the marks of her fingers on countless necks.
But if the Illyri were guilty of revisiting the tactics of tyrants throughout history, so too were they repeating age-old mistakes, and reaping the consequences. Not all of those who were enduring the Scourging—either as victims or onlookers—meekly accepted their fate. Many joined the Resistance in the Highlands, or swelled the membership of its cells in towns and cities north and south of the border. Some made their way to Ireland, where, like the unfortunate British before them, the
Illyri had found themselves locked in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare. Huge numbers of Illyri troops were kept busy by a comparatively small number of hostile units, although, unlike in the Irish Troubles of the previous century, those units now enjoyed the support of most of the population.
Throughout the world, similar hotbeds of resistance seemed to be mushrooming every day, and the ferocity of the fight was intense.
The problem for the Illyri was that they had never before attempted to conquer a race as advanced as humanity, so there was simply no model to follow. Partly by accident, partly by design, the Illyri had based their colonization on the successful empires and invaders of human history—the Romans, the Persians, even, to a degree, the Nazis—but had ignored the greatest lesson to be learned from all of them: failure. Empires decayed, and invading forces could not survive indefinitely in hostile lands. The Illyri rule on Earth could not last, or so the Resistance whispered.
But there were those among the Illyri who did not want the mission on Earth to continue. They had other plans for humanity.
Darker plans.
• • •
The Resistance leaders at the battle of Dundearg quickly vanished in the aftermath, disappearing at dawn’s light before Illyri reinforcements could arrive in numbers. They had not done so without trace, however, for they had left their DNA all over the castle, and Vena and her Securitats managed to identify most of those who had been present through the examination of minute samples of skin and hair, creating intricate facial reconstructions, even of those for whom they could find no other medical records. One of those identified was an Illyri deserter known to the Resistance as Fremd, or sometimes the Green Man. It was bad enough that an Illyri traitor should have been among the fighters at Dundearg, but Fremd was also a former Securitat, one long believed dead. Fremd had secret knowledge, knowledge that could endanger the whole Illyri mission on Earth. Fremd was dangerous, and much of Vena’s effort was focused on finding him. She wanted Fremd, dead or alive.
But Vena wanted Meia taken relatively unharmed. She had a selection of tools and blades ready and waiting for when Meia was captured, and hers would be a long, slow, painful trip to oblivion.
Vena’s only regret was that she would not also be able to put Syl Hellais under a knife. But Vena’s reach was long: someone else would take care of Syl for her, and her torments would be great.
All this she considered as she watched Cynna strangle the teenagers. They had been found painting a swastika on a garage door in Leith, which was bad enough, but one of them was armed with a pistol, and another had traces of explosive on his skin and clothes. Two girls, one boy. Cynna had saved the boy for last. When she turned to Vena, her eyes were bright with an excitement that was almost sexual.
“I want more,” said Cynna.
“And you will have more,” said Vena. “As many as you want . . .”
CHAPTER 36
Trask sat on a bench by the old raven cages in the deserted grounds of Edinburgh Zoo, although deserted was a relative term when surrounded by over a thousand animals, any number of which only really began to find their mojo once darkness fell. He could hear an owl hooting nearby: probably Amber, the zoo’s Eurasian eagle owl, a giant of a bird capable of taking a fox if it was hungry enough. Trask smiled, happy that he had remembered the bird’s name. Once upon a time he could have named half of the animals here. Those names were probably still buried somewhere in the attic of his memory, along with the lineups of various Hibs football teams from the eighties, and the girls that he’d kissed before he’d finally married and started a family.
When he let his guard down, he could recall other names too: the names of the lost, of the dead. Children, most of them, or little more than children, killed by the Illyri for trying to take back their world from the invaders. In truth, their faces were never far from his mind, and even if he had been inclined to forget them, they would have returned to him each time he passed the mother of one of them on the street, or met one of their fathers in a pub in St. Leonard’s, or the Grange, or Blackford. Some of those parents still blamed Trask for what had befallen their sons and daughters, for to them he was the face of the Resistance, the one who had encouraged their children to rise up and fight.
In reality, though, Trask hadn’t encouraged anyone to fight—quite the opposite, in fact. When kids came to him, their eyes bright and angry, looking to strike a blow for humanity, he would turn them away without exception and claim not to know what they were talking about. He didn’t need any more deaths on his conscience, that was part of it, but he had also been in this game for long enough to know that you didn’t take them the first time they asked, nor the second, and not even the third. Mostly, you didn’t take the ones who asked at all. Instead you watched, and you waited. The really talented ones, the gifted ones, would show themselves with a look, a gesture, a minor act of insubordination, of rebellion. They were already fighting their war against the Illyri: they just hadn’t formalized it yet.
And then there were others, like Paul Kerr, who were fashioned by the Illyri themselves, turned into warriors by the actions of the invaders. Trask had always known that Paul would make his mark in the Resistance. He’d known it before the boy entered his teens, had seen it in his eyes: the intelligence, the careful regard, the memory for detail, the capacity for leadership. But the Illyri had provided the finishing touches, taking some of the boy’s sensitivity away and replacing it with a hint of coldness, a streak of ruthlessness. They’d done it by throwing his dad into the back of a Securitat transport, striking him with an electric baton, and then leaving him to die on the floor as his heart gave out from the shock. Trask had held Bob Kerr in his arms as the life departed from him, weeping over him, crying like a child. They’d been friends since they were boys, and had started work in the zoo on the same day. Bob had ended up in charge of half a dozen mammals while Trask took care of the reptiles. They went to soccer matches together, to the pub together. They’d even holidayed together, because their wives got along with each other just as well as the husbands did. Hardly a day went by when he and Bob didn’t at least talk on the phone, and even then they’d often make the effort to meet for a quick drink, or just to walk their dogs on Blackford Hill.
Now Bob was gone, and Katherine, Bob’s widow, no longer spoke to Trask, while Trask’s own missus had long since left him. It might even be true to say that Katherine Kerr hated Trask because he too had a coldness in him, an unthawed place in his heart. It had led him to make an exception to his own rule, and instead approach Paul directly and offer him a chance to avenge his father’s death by joining the Resistance. Paul had said yes, and in time his brother, Steven, had joined too, and so a train of events was set in motion that ended, finally, with their mother being deprived not only of her husband but her two boys, for they were now far away from Edinburgh, far away from anywhere that Trask could name. He looked up at the night sky. The most distant of the stars visible to him was not even close to wherever the Kerr boys might be. Now he could add their names to the list of the lost as well, and their fates to his conscience.
The owl grew quiet, and Trask took a sip from the flask of whisky in his hand. The air had a damp chill to it. He felt the cold now in ways that he never had before. He was getting old, he realized. He could see it reflected in his daughters, Nessa and Jean. They were no longer girls, but young women. It was only a matter of time before they’d run off with fancy fellows, he guessed—well, it would be if they ever managed to find blokes that weren’t scared to death of them. They were both attractive in their way, but Nessa was a big lass—not fat, but hard and muscular, and smart with it—while Jean had a fascination with knives that tended to make the lads nervous.
Trask glanced at his watch. She wouldn’t be coming now. It had been many months since they’d last met, but he’d kept up their arrangement. They’d agreed to come to the zoo on the first and third Tuesdays of every mo
nth, three hours after sunset; more frequently if necessary, but always on those days. Then she had disappeared, hunted by the Illyri, but still he kept coming to the zoo, just in case. In a strange way, he kind of missed her. Oh, she scared him the way Nessa and Jean scared most of the menfolk of Edinburgh, but like them, she had character. Strange that she wasn’t human. Stranger still, as it turned out, that she wasn’t even Illyri either. She was—what was the word they used?—a Mech. He’d have called her a robot, he supposed, but she wasn’t quite that. A robot implied something mechanical, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, or little R2D2 in Star Wars, a construct that would echo like an empty garbage can if you tapped it hard enough. But she had a layer of flesh and blood to her, and a sense of humor. She even liked him a little, Trask thought, and he didn’t think that artificial beings could “like.” He liked her in return. It was all very confusing.
He checked the scanner in his pocket, although it was primed to buzz and vibrate if it detected a signal. The device searched constantly for signs of Illyri surveillance. It couldn’t do much about larger drones—which flew too high to pick up conversations anyway, and were used only to confirm positions and movements—but it was very good at detecting the various insects and arachnids that the Illyri had adapted for spying. Spiders, flies, even midges had been electronically enhanced by the Illyri to act as their eyes and ears, but they gave off minute signals that the scanner could detect. The zoo, though, appeared to be clear.