Chronicles of the Invaders 1: Conquest (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
he Diplomatic Corps had taken over the old Glasgow School of Art for its regional headquarters, and it was there that the Securitats had their Scottish lair. The building had been the first commission given to the great Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, resulting in a mixture of Scottish baronial architecture and Art Nouveau motifs. Beautiful but imposing, it stood at the edge of a steep hill, and took the shape of a letter
E
. The panes in the big industrial windows on its northern side had been replaced by toughened glass, capable of withstanding a blast without shattering. When a massive truck bomb had exploded outside the building years before, the glass had not even cracked, and concrete blocks now prevented vehicles from gaining access to the area. The surrounding spiked walls were more for show than anything else. Like all Diplomat facilities, the building was protected by an energy shield. It was state-of-the-art; its advanced design meant that the nausea associated with the prototype shields—which made those beneath them feel ill, and had long since been mothballed because of the queasiness they caused—did not arise.

Naturally, the Diplomats had not seen fit to share their improved shield technology with their Military rivals.

In the school’s basement mortuary, two masked and gloved technicians stared down at the headless body of Sub-Consul Thaios. Even in the temperature-controlled environment of the mortuary, Thaios’s remains had begun to rot. His skin was covered with black and purple blotches, and a stench arose from his flesh. This was unusual, to say the least. Under other circumstances, a full autopsy might have been in order to investigate the exceptionally quick decay. But an autopsy would not be carried out. The orders received by the technicians for dealing with Thaios’s body were very different.

“You’re sure about this?” said the first technician.

“I just do what I’m told,” said the other. “I know better than to ask questions.”

“But he should be accorded a proper service, not . . .
this
. He’s Consul Gradus’s nephew. There’ll be trouble when Gradus finds out.”

His colleague glared at him. He was older, and more senior.

“Don’t you understand anything, you young fool? The order came from Gradus himself. Now just get on with it. He stinks.”

The younger technician began to close the body bag, then stopped.

“What are
they
?” he asked.

“What are what?” said his colleague.

“Those.” He pointed a gloved finger at Thaios’s chest. It appeared to be covered in tiny red threads that poked from his pores. He hadn’t noticed them before. He stroked them with his hand, but the filaments were so delicate that he could barely feel them.

“I don’t know,” said his partner. “And I don’t want to know. Forget that you ever saw them, and I’ll do the same.”

No more protests were heard. Together the two Illyri sealed the bag and wheeled it to the furnace room. There, as ordered, they burned the body of Thaios. As it turned to charred meat, they heard footsteps behind them.

“Is it done?” said a female voice.

“Yes,” said the older of the technicians. Had the new arrival been anyone else, he would have been tempted to make a joke about Thaios not just being done, but well done; hearing that voice, however, killed all thoughts of joking. It would be safer to make his silly comments later, in private, for the woman in the black-and-gold uniform of the Securitats wasn’t likely to laugh. She was Vena, the most senior Securitat in the United Kingdom, and possibly the most terrifying member of the secret police between here and Illyr itself. Vena had never been seen to laugh, and she only rarely smiled. Ice ran in her veins, ice and scalding steam, echoing the twin silver streaks that adorned her shaven head.

“And nobody examined the body?” she said, and her voice was as sharp and direct as a dagger.

“No one. We put him in a secure locker under a serial number, with no name. We did as we were told.”

“Good.”

“Funny how he decayed so quickly, though,” said the younger technician, and beside him he heard his colleague give a sharp intake of breath. So close. They’d been so close. He’d warned him about questions, warned him time and time again.

He barely registered the weapon that appeared in Vena’s hand. It was too late to react, too late to do anything but die. The pulses that killed the two technicians came close together, the thick basement walls smothering the sound.

And they joined Thaios in the flames.

CHAPTER NINE

D
espite the gratitude she felt for her father’s gift, Syl still had no intention of sitting in class for her birthday, but neither could she simply wander the castle’s corridors all day. That would be pointless.

She knew the castle better than almost anyone else, including perhaps her father’s own security detail. She had been exploring the old fortress ever since she was able to crawl, and had discovered spyholes and listening posts created centuries before, when courtiers had eavesdropped on the deliberations of kings. She had even found the secret area behind the fireplace in the Great Hall, the grand room in which her father often met with visiting dignitaries. Boarded up for the visit of a Russian president during the previous century, the spyhole’s existence had been forgotten until Syl had stumbled across a mention of it in the archives. It was her place now, and she would sometimes retreat there to read or listen to music, cocooned in the darkness. At other times, she would spy on her father’s meetings if the timing suited, but for the most part they were so dull that she rarely bothered.

Nevertheless, from her snooping she knew of events on Earth that Toris never shared with his students. She was aware that, like so many empires before them, the Illyri had given up on taming Afghanistan, which would have been more worrying if the Afghan people hadn’t themselves divided into opposing Islamic factions—just as various Christian groups had elsewhere—and then turned all their rage upon each other. The humans’ argument was always the same, regardless of the god or gods they worshipped: if their god had created all living things, then had he not also created the Illyri? Or was it only Man who was made in this god’s image, Man who was central to all creation?

The Illyri, meanwhile, considered themselves simply to be creatures of the universe, so such arguments would have been meaningless to them had they not brought with them such violent repercussions. There had been some discussion about outlawing religion entirely, but this had been tried on other conquered worlds and the results were always the same: suppression concentrated the power of belief. But religious extremism was an ongoing problem, and too often it appeared to be motivated less by faith than by a hatred of anything and anyone that was not like itself.

And in her hidey-hole, Syl had wondered if Man had not been made in the image of his god but had instead shaped a god in Man’s image: violent, wrathful, and vengeful. It was all rather grim, she decided, and her birthday was certainly not a day to be spent eavesdropping on even more gloomy news from a hole in a wall.

Listless, she wandered into the lounge beside her bedroom. The house in which she and her father dwelt had originally been built for the castle governor in 1742, and had remained a governor’s residence for over a century before the post was abolished. It had then served as a hospital until the position was reestablished in 1935, and now an Illyri governor slept in its bedroom and ate in its dining room. It was a handsome building, if a little cold in winter.

Out of habit, Syl picked up a book, but put it down after only a few paragraphs. She wanted to be active. She wanted to
do
something. She moved to the window, swept back the heavy drapes, and looked down on the busy courtyard. This had been transformed into a landing pad for the governor and other important visitors, and shuttles, skimmers, and interceptors used it regularly.

Syl watched the traffic for a time, all of it routine, longing to climb aboard a shuttle and go somewhere, anywhere. Yet she wasn’t supposed to leave even the castle’s environs unaccompanied. While the Royal Mile area of Edinburgh was less dangerous for the Illyri than elsewhere, they were still objects of vaguely hostile curiosity at best. It was not unknown for stones to be thrown at them, and worse could happen once the castle was out of sight.

But dwindling away inside these walls felt like a death all of its own.

It started to rain. The heavy droplets splashed against the window, and the courtyard cleared as everyone ran for cover. That solved it then: she should read, and forget about going out . . . but what a waste that would be. It hardly seemed worth all the grief she’d doubtless get for skipping school if it was only for a day spent cooped up in the castle.

She walked back to her room and kicked open her closet. Like most young Illyri, her wardrobe consisted of a mix of Illyri dress—mainly long robes for non-Military and security personnel, whether male or female—and Earth clothing, although her father disapproved of nonregulation garments, even on his own daughter. But the Illyri were being changed by Earth, just as Earth was being changed by the Illyri. It was inevitable, in a way: wine, whisky, illicit tobacco, and even human fabrics had made their way back to Illyr along with the other prizes of conquest. Silk was especially prized by Illyri of both sexes, along with certain furs, including mink and fox. They were largely symbols of wealth and influence, for only those with power had both access to the valued items and the means to transport them back to Illyr.

But the human clothing gave Syl freedom of movement in the city. Yes, she was tall, but not unusually so, not yet. Her skin had not yet reached the full golden glow of maturity, so she just appeared lightly tanned. She had tinted glasses to hide her eyes—sunglasses were better, but it didn’t look like today was a day for shades—and a crazy velvet hat to conceal her lustrous hair. Now, grinning to herself, she dressed in jeans and an old coat; with her hat fixed firmly on her head, she reckoned she easily passed for a foreign student—Italian, perhaps, or Spanish.

“My name is, uh, Isabella,” she said to her mirrored reflection, putting on a dreadful Italianesque accent. “
Buongiorno
, Edinburgh.”

Quickly she stuffed the human clothing into a backpack and made her way to the courtyard through the quietest corridors of the castle. She changed her clothes in a bathroom close to the Argyle Tower, then put up an umbrella, and slipped out into the rain. Nobody stopped her as she left the castle; the guards were more concerned about those who tried to enter than those who were leaving. If she was lucky, and there were guards she knew on the gates when she returned, she would be able to convince them not to report her to her father. Syl was particularly good at bending the sentries to her will.

But that was for later. For now, she was sixteen, and away from the castle. She was free. So caught up was she in the pleasure of the moment, even as the rain continued to fall and a cold wind blew stinging droplets in her face, that she did not notice the figure that detached itself from the shadows by the Esplanade and fell casually into step behind her, hidden by the crowds.

CHAPTER TEN

P
aul and Steven approached the Royal Mile, and Knutter’s grocery shop.

Knutter was a minor asset to the Resistance, passing on information and providing a safe house for weapons and munitions when required. A cousin of his from Aberdeen had been killed in the early days of the invasion, shot in the act of throwing a firebomb at a patrol. As a consequence, Knutter was barely able to conceal his hatred for the invaders. He had little access to the Resistance’s secrets, though, and knew the identities of only a handful of its operatives. It was better that way. Very few of those who fought the aliens knew much beyond their own field of operations, for just as the Resistance had its informers close to the Illyri, so too there were those among the humans who were prepared to sell out their own for money, or advancement, or to secure the return of conscripts to their families. The less men like Knutter knew, the less they might accidentally reveal, or have tortured from them if they were ever caught and interrogated.

Behind his back he was commonly known as Knutter the Nutter, because of both his short temper and his tendency to knock down those who crossed him by using his bulbous forehead or scarred crown to break their noses, a tactic known as “nutting” or the “Glasgow kiss.” His head was shaved, and his forearms were adorned with shamrock tattoos and the insignia of Celtic football club, even though he was a native of Edinburgh and the shop had been in his family for generations.

What made Knutter’s store particularly useful was the fact that it provided a secret access point to the South Bridge Vaults, the system of over one hundred chambers in the arches of the South Bridge, completed at the end of the eighteenth century. They had first housed taverns and the workshops of various trades, as well as serving as slum housing for the city’s poor. It was said that the nineteenth-century serial killers Burke and Hare had hunted among the residents of the Vaults for their victims, selling the bodies for medical experimentation. Then, sometime in the mid- to late nineteenth century, the Vaults were closed, and they hadn’t been excavated further until the end of the twentieth century, when they became a tourist attraction. Now they provided a hiding place for guns and, occasionally, Resistance members who had been identified and were being hunted by the Illyri, although most fugitives preferred to take their chances above ground. The Vaults were grim and dank and said to be haunted, although in Knutter’s experience it was only those who already believed in ghosts who were susceptible to such fantasies. Knutter himself had yet to encounter anything, either human or alien, that could not be felled by a sufficiently hard blow from his own head. So far, his forehead had not passed through the face of a supernatural entity.

But it was Knutter who first heard the noises from the Vaults after a few too many drinks, and it had caused him to briefly reconsider his views on ghosts—and, indeed, drinking. But the noises continued to sound well after he had sobered up, and he had also recognized the curious burbling, clicking language of the Toads coming through the cracks in his basement wall. It was then that he had informed the Resistance. Once its leaders had concluded that Knutter was not simply hallucinating, further enquiries were made among its informers. By piecing together various pearls of information, a chain of events was constructed, and it was deduced that the Illyri had been tunneling with great secrecy under the city, and had come close to Knutter, and the Vaults.

The Resistance leaders were furious: a major excavation had been carried out quite literally under their noses, and they hadn’t known. Their system of spies and informers had let them down. The Illyri had managed to keep their tunnels very quiet until Knutter’s keen ear had picked up on what was happening. The Resistance had concluded it was the Diplomatic Corps and not the Military that was behind the excavations. They had enjoyed little success in infiltrating the Diplomats, for they tended not to use human labor, and most of their forces kept their distance from humans, except when they were fighting them, or arresting them, or killing them. If the Military had been engaged in digging beneath Edinburgh, someone would have informed the Resistance. Only the Corps could keep such a project secret, aided, perhaps, by the Securitats.

Katherine Kerr, the boys’ mother, had been a tour guide in the city before the Illyri invaded, and had passed on her knowledge of its secrets—among them the location of various concealed entrances to the Vaults, Knutter’s shop included—to her close family. This was why Paul and Steven had been chosen for the mission, and given instructions from the top, via Nessa, to investigate further. No point in hanging about, Nessa had said. Knutter was expecting them just as soon as they’d finished their tea.

Now an Illyri patrol vehicle hummed by, its gray armor bristling with weaponry. It reminded Paul of a huge woodlouse. Its wheels were concealed beneath its frame, and its body was V-shaped to protect the Illyri inside by dispelling the force of explosives. It didn’t even have windows; its sensor array provided a detailed picture of the environment to its crew without exposing its occupants to harm. Like most of the smaller Illyri transports, it was powered by biogas produced mostly from animal waste, although the Illyri also used vehicles powered by electricity and hydrogen, the latter derived mainly from methane. The boys gave the vehicle a quick glance, but nothing more. Taking too much interest in an Illyri patrol might lead the patrol to take an interest in turn, but ignoring it entirely was almost as bad because it suggested that you were trying too hard to remain unnoticed. It was a delicate balance to strike.

“Are you nervous?” said Paul.

“No,” said Steven, then corrected himself: “Maybe a bit.”

“Don’t be. We’ve a right to walk the streets. They haven’t taken that away from us yet.”

Ahead of them lay the Royal Mile, the castle towering over it. Before the occupation, the castle had been the city’s main tourist attraction. Now few humans went there voluntarily, and the ones who entered it to work were usually either traitors or spies. Paul had never set foot inside it, and even though he was committed to the Resistance, he sometimes wondered if there would ever come a time when sightseers might innocently wander its battlements again, remembering the great occupation that had once based itself here and had finally been defeated. In his darker moments, he found it hard to imagine.

“Walk faster,” he said to Steven. The rain had stopped for a time, but it would return. It always did in this city.

•••

Syl stepped out of the vintage clothing store, her purchases in a plastic bag. The man behind the counter had looked at her oddly as she browsed, but said nothing. Even if he suspected that she might not be human, he probably needed the business. The proximity of the castle and the presence of stop-and-search Illyri patrols meant that many citizens tended to avoid the area around the Royal Mile. Still, Syl bought a lovely old purse decorated with mother-of-pearl, and a white wool coat with a fur collar that would keep her warm in winter.

The streets were dry again, and the sun was coming out. Perhaps the day would be good after all, a possibility worth celebrating. Syl glanced to her left. There was a little coffee shop nearby, and it sold very good pastries. Maybe she could stick a candle in one and sing herself a song. She smiled at the thought, and started walking. Canongate Kirk, a seventeenth-century church, was ahead of her, and beside it the coffee shop.

Suddenly there was a massive
bang
, as though a huge hand had slammed itself down on the Royal Mile, and the coffee shop simply wasn’t there anymore. It had disintegrated into a cloud of dirt and brick and glass. Syl was knocked to the ground, and instinctively put her arms up, shielding her face and head. Her ears were ringing, and she couldn’t hear properly. Then the dust found her, and she started to choke. She tried not to breathe but she was frightened, and so she began to hyperventilate, and the choking became worse.

Frantic hands were on her now, trying to pull her to her feet.

“Are you all right?” said a voice. It sounded like it was speaking from underwater, but it was still familiar to her. “Syl, are you hurt?”

Syl shook her head. She coughed and spat dust. She felt water splashing on to her face, and then the bottle was in her hands and she drank from it.

“I don’t think so,” she said at last, once she had stopped choking. She squinted up at the figure before her until she could see more clearly through the fine dust. It was hazy in the smoke-blotted sunlight, but she still recognized the feminine figure with her head cocked like a bird’s, small for her age but fast and agile, and currently badly disguised in mismatched human clothing and sunglasses that were a match for Syl’s own shades back at the castle. After all, they had bought them together, because that’s what best friends tend to do.

“Ani!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Following you,” said Ani, and her words came to Syl as a distorted whisper, even though Ani was speaking normally. “I thought it would be funny, but it isn’t now. Quickly, patrols will be coming. We have to get away from here.”

They heard sirens, and from above, the whistling sound of approaching interceptors. Ani put her hand out to help Syl up, but before Syl could take it, another strange hand found hers, yanking her upright and steadying her on her feet. She gave a little squeal of surprise.

“Are you hurt?” said a male voice.

In front of the girls stood two young humans, clearly brothers. It was the older of the two who had spoken. In the dust and chaos of the explosion’s aftermath, he had clearly mistaken Syl and Ani for human girls. Syl shook her head, confused, trying to remember her human name, her Italian accent.

“Do you need help?” he asked, and Syl found herself watching his mouth closely, feeling dazed, seeing it shape the words that she could barely hear. His bottom lip was curved and a little pillowy, and she had an odd urge to touch it to see if it was as soft as it looked, so pink and clean in his dusty face.

“We’re fine,” said Ani. “We’re just trying to get home.”

She pulled hard on Syl’s elbow, starting to turn in the direction of the castle, but the younger boy stopped her with an outstretched arm. Now Syl was pushed even closer to the older one, watching his mouth moving once more, half hearing and half lip-reading, near enough to him to see stubble like a little sprinkle of pepper across his top lip.

“Wait,” he said. “Did you see what happened? Were there people—”

“We don’t know,” interrupted Ani, jerking Syl’s arm again, and Syl could feel the panic coming off her friend in waves. No human was ever to be trusted, but in the chaotic aftermath of an explosion it would be particularly easy to snatch two young Illyri from the streets.

“Hold on,” said Syl, and she gave her head a shake so that her ears cleared somewhat. “It was MacBride’s coffee shop—I think that’s where the explosion happened. I didn’t see anyone on the street beforehand, but there might have been people inside. That’s all I know. But thank you for helping me.”

“We really have to go,” said Ani urgently, and now Syl turned to follow her, but the boy didn’t move, and his younger companion closed in too, blocking their path. This is it, thought Syl. They’ve seen through our disguises. They
know
.

“Not that way,” said the older boy.

“Let us pass,” said Ani. “Please!”

“You can’t go that way,” he said. “You just can’t.”

“Why not?” said Ani.

Syl looked past them. Already there were soldiers and emergency vehicles racing from the direction of the castle.

“Because there may be another bomb.”

And as he spoke, there was a second massive blast, and the approaching vehicles were blown apart.