Into Everywhere (20 page)

‘The police are guarding it,’ Ayo said, but told her secretary to call Aunty Jael.

After a moment, the man said, ‘She is not picking up, ma’am. There seems to be a problem with the local network.’

‘Find out if the police know anything,’ Ayo said.

The secretary nodded and turned away.

Tony said, ‘Now would be a good time to give me back my ship. It has survey drones. They can reach the facility in a couple of minutes.’

‘We already have plenty of drones.’

‘They won’t be much use when the claim jumpers head up and out. But I can give chase—’

‘Not another word about your ship,’ Ayo said. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Her secretary said that the police guards at the laboratory had reported that nothing was amiss.

‘You see?’ Ayo told Tony. ‘Everything is fine.’

‘The last I knew, there were only two guards.’

Ayo looked at her secretary. ‘Have the police sent any additional support?’

‘I have been told that all available personnel are either searching for the fallen escape pods or guarding the clinic, ma’am. The police believe that this may be an attempt to kidnap some of the patients. Many of them are children of important and powerful people.’

‘If the police are protecting them,’ Tony said, ‘no one is protecting the wizards or Aunty Jael.’

‘Send some people over there, just in case,’ Ayo told her secretary. ‘A single squad will suffice.’

‘I want to go with them,’ Tony said.

‘Everything is under control,’ Ayo said.

‘The wizards are my responsibility,’ Tony said. ‘If you won’t let me use my ship, I should ride with that squad. And if I cannot ride with them, I will find my own way there.’

Ayo studied him for a moment. ‘Tell me this isn’t about getting your ship back.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Tony said, hoping she would not catch the lie.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Go. But as an observer. You will do everything the squad commander tells you to do. If she tells you to stay in the flitter, you will stay in the flitter.’

‘Thank you, sister. I won’t let you down.’

‘Get upstairs. I will order them to pick you up from the plaza.’

Tony heard the flitter coming in to land as he hurried out of the Black Tower’s entrance. Its skids kissed the marble slabs of the plaza and he ran through the prop wash and climbed the steep ramp into its belly, fell into one of the bucket seats as the craft leapt into the air with a roar of turboprops, almost fell out of the seat as it made a steep turn.

Someone came towards him, stepping easily despite the tilt in the deck and the jolting ride. Sade Oyecan: a tough wiry woman whose family had been in service of Tony’s for ever. She had trained him in use of weapons and personal security fifteen years ago. He remembered her sharp voice echoing under the high roof of the gymnasium during krav maga sessions, the whiplash of her scorn, the relentless exercises, the happiness he had felt whenever she doled out rare praise.

She dumped an exosuit in his lap, told him to put it on. ‘You won’t be armed. It might make you reckless, and I remember your attempts at marksmanship. You’re liable to hit one of us if there’s any excitement.’

‘I want to help in any way I can.’

‘You can do that by staying out of trouble. Keep to the rear, move only when I tell you to move. Understood?’

‘Absolutely.’

Sade helped him buckle into the exosuit. Its musculature woke with a shiver, tightened at his ankles and knees and hips, his shoulders and elbows. Sade handed him gloves and a visored helmet. ‘Remember how this works?’

Tony scanned the symbols and readouts of the visor’s head-up display, nodded. His mouth was dry. He felt as if he had swallowed a knot of thorns.

Sade rapped the top of his helmet. ‘Stay back. If there’s any trouble throw yourself flat and wait for me to tell you when to move. The place is dark. I’m hoping that’s the police’s idea of defence. My people will set up a perimeter and sweep the area, and then we’ll walk in. You tell the wizards to evacuate; we’ll escort them out. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

The flitter made a sudden sharp turn, then dropped faster than the Black Tower’s express elevator. Tony grabbed a strap and hung on, bit his tongue when the little craft banged down. He swallowed a spit of blood, followed Sade and the half-dozen guards down the ramp into a cutting wind that blew flat out of the freezing dark. Snow up to his knees. He remembered how to toggle the visor’s starlight view and slogged after the others to a fence half-buried in a smooth white wind-sculpted wave.

The long, low laboratory building stood beyond snow-covered fields. No lights showing anywhere. On the command band, one of the guards was telling Sade that drones were not picking up any movement.

‘Try another sweep,’ Sade said. ‘And give me a line to the police in there.’

She talked to someone, a brief exchange of mostly yeses and noes, told Tony that the lab had been locked down and everyone was safe.

‘Tell whoever you are talking to that I want a word with Junot Johnson,’ Tony said.

‘All’s quiet here, Mr Tony. The hostiles are way to the northwest, up in the foothills.’

‘Don’t be so sure. Tell them to put my man on the line.’

Sade leaned close, said quietly, ‘If you have cold feet, you can go back to the flitter. Wait until we’ve secured the place.’

‘If you were so certain nothing was wrong, why didn’t you land outside the entrance? Ask them to put Junot on.’

Sade asked. She told Tony, ‘They say he isn’t around right now.’

‘Something isn’t right.’

‘Maybe your man is looking after the wizards.’

‘I told him to lock them in one of the cold stores. And the greenhouses should be lit up. Aunty Jael is running experiments in them. Tell the police I want to talk to her.’

After a moment, Sade said, ‘Apparently she’s busy. I think you’re right, Mr Tony. Something’s wrong.’

‘Ask one of the police to come out. Tell them to bring Junot with them. Tell them it is on my order.’

Sade passed on the message. Silence. Stars twinkled brightly everywhere overhead. Seeing them from a planet’s surface was very different from being aloft. They seemed so very cold and remote.

‘They’ve cut the channel,’ Sade said, and a moment later a constellation of little sparks crackled and died in the dark air above the laboratory.

‘The drones are down!’ a man shouted, and the flitter’s rotors spun up with a roar, blowing a huge gust of snow over them. As the machine lurched into the air, something screamed across the fields. Tony saw the flitter’s shadow against the starry sky, saw it tilt hard right, and then it burst in a flower of bright flame and someone banged into him and knocked him face down in the snow.

‘Okay,’ Sade said after a few moments, and helped Tony to his knees. A cauldron of flames was tilted in a stand of pine trees, throwing huge flickering shadows across a stretch of snow pockmarked with fallen debris and little fires. And in the other direction thin dark figures were running across the snowy fields, moving with curious high gaits . . . Tony’s visor popped brackets around them and zoomed in. They were four of Aunty Jael’s hands, packs strapped to their chests.

‘Suicide bombers,’ Sade sang out. ‘Put them down.’

There was a brief soprano squall of gunfire. Three of the figures collapsed. The survivor came on, zigzagging through spurts of snow, and Sade jacked her carbine to her shoulder and squeezed off three shots. The hand collapsed, headless, a hundred metres off. A moment later, a plume of dirt and snow erupted where it had fallen and the clap of the explosion echoed out across the dark flat countryside.

In the freezing silence Sade stood up and told the guards they were going in. She was calm and matter-of-fact, saying they would cross the open ground as quickly as they could, selecting one group to take the main entrance, another to take the loading bay. The guards rose up and ran; Tony chased after Sade. His exosuit took over, pounding through knee-deep swales of snow. His head-up display was cluttered with signs and portents as the suit analysed and dismissed likely targets; he ached for a gun. His breath was a harsh engine. Muscle memory from the combat games he had played as a kid, an echo of childish glee, and a sick apprehension growing because this was not a game where you died in half a dozen ways before going home to supper.

Three guards cut away towards the main entrance; the others, led by Sade, ploughed straight on. Tony stumbled and fell flat on his face in a deep snowdrift, pushed to his feet and sprinted to the corner of one of the greenhouses where Sade and the guards crouched. Silence. Nothing moving in the dark shadow of the laboratory.

Sade put a hand on his shoulder, pointed to the lab’s loading bay. Tony nodded to show he understood.

‘Now!’ she said, and they were up and running again. Over a fence, across a yard, halting in the shelter of a big tractor. The loading bay was a dozen metres away when a sudden thunderclap of red flame rolled up beyond the laboratory’s flat roof. ‘Booby-trapped,’ someone reported breathlessly on the command band. Then: ‘Hands coming at us,’ and there was the sound of small-arms fire.

Sade said to Tony, ‘How many of those things does Aunty Jael have?’

‘Ten or twelve, I think. She can control some of the equipment, too. Low-loaders and so on.’

‘Is there a kill switch?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tony was not sure that the hands were being run by Aunty Jael, either. He had a bad feeling about her and Junot and the wizards.

‘Then we’ll take them down one by one,’ Sade said.

One of the guards scrambled onto the loading bay’s platform, plugged something into the keypad by the door, flattened against the wall as the door rolled up, took a quick peek inside, gave the all-clear thumbs-up. Sade and the other guard dashed forward; all three vanished inside. Tony took a few seconds to nerve himself up and follow them. He had almost reached the loading platform when bright flame blasted out of the door and a hard jolt of noise and air slammed into him.

He was on his back. Dazed. A high ringing in his ears. The front of his exosuit was smouldering; pockets of blue flame guttered in the snow around him. He could not move. His exosuit was locked.

Someone leaned in above him. A young man with a pale face and a stiff brush of blond hair, a black band painted across eyes that gleamed silver. Tiny crosses for pupils. Tony tried and failed to scrabble backwards. He was trapped in a rigid lobster shell, helpless as the man reached down and unlatched his helmet, saying, ‘I just need your head.’

Tony saw the glint of a knife blade, his bowels liquefied, and then the man grunted and flew sideways. Tony lay there, sweating inside the shell of his suit. He had pissed himself, could feel it soaking into the liner, warm then cold.

Sade knelt beside him, asking if he was okay, her voice distanced and flattened by the ringing in his ears. She had lost her helmet and the right side of her suit was scorched and her arm was strapped to her torso with a grappling cord.

‘I can’t move,’ Tony said. The words were barbs in his throat.

‘I can fix that,’ she said, and stuck something into the port under his chestplate.

The hard shell of the exosuit relaxed. Tony rolled over, got to his knees, stood up. The pale man lay in the snow, a raw red crater in his chest, one arm flung above his head and a saw-bladed knife lying nearby.

‘We were hit by a booby trap,’ Sade said. ‘A hand ran up and exploded. Killed Tokun. Are you okay?’

‘Sade, I owe you my life.’

‘We’re not done yet. Can you walk?’

He could walk. They headed towards the main entrance. The floor of the lobby was shattered and scorched; overhead, shredded tiles dangled from twisted struts. One of the guards met them, said that aside from the booby trap there had been minimal resistance. ‘We knocked out about a dozen hands. Two hostiles took off in a spinner. It looked like they were loading equipment when we came in.’

Tony said, ‘What about the people who were working here?’

‘They didn’t make it, sir,’ the guard said. ‘I’m sorry.’

The dead were in the work space, lying in stinking black water that had spilled from the smashed ruin of the stromatolite aquarium. A man and a woman in Commons police green, Junot Johnson, three wizards in their white coats. The wizards had been decapitated. Tony recognised the heraldic formulae scrawled on Cho Wing-James’s lab coat and looked away.

‘I think they took the heads of the wizards because they are infected with a Ghajar eidolon,’ he told Sade. That was why the man she had killed had wanted to cut off his head, he realised. He was infected, too.

According to one of the guards, all of the dead had been electrocuted.

‘Like with a taser but a lot more voltage,’ she said. ‘The filaments are still stuck in their skin.’

Sade, surveying the dismal scene, pointed to several small hands lying in the flood. One, the plastic shell of its torso badly cracked, was still twitching. ‘It looks like they were attacked by the hands, and made a last stand here,’ she said. ‘But who was controlling the hands?’

Tony was certain that Junot Johnson, loyal to the last, had smashed the aquarium to prevent the stromatolites falling into the hands of the raiders. He asked the guards if they had swept the building.

‘This floor is clear,’ one said.

‘Two of the wizards are missing. We need to check the basements,’ Tony said.

There was no one in the cold store, and the door to Aunty Jael’s room was open. Her laminated brain and the apparatus that supported it were gone.

‘I think Junot and the others were attacked and killed before the raiders arrived,’ Tony said. ‘Someone mobilised the hands against them, and sabotaged the comms so they couldn’t call for help. And I think I know who did it.’

‘You mean the two missing wizards?’ Sade said.

‘Not the wizards,’ Tony said. ‘It was someone who knew everything—’

Sade raised a hand and half-turned away and began a brief conversation with someone on the command band.

Tony realised that the intruders could not have known that he would come to find them at the laboratory. And because they wanted the eidolon in his head they would have gone to look for him . . . A panicky convulsion passed through him. ‘I need to get back to the city,’ he told Sade. ‘I need to get there right now.’