London Wild (96 page)

February sighed. She didn’t like the idea because she didn’t want to venture into the unknown. However, she was a hunter and no stranger to a little bit of danger. ‘Okay then,’ she said eventually, ‘but we better be quick
. Myajes is going to want to take the gateway to Earth with him, and I don’t think it’ll work when it’s off the wall and in his hand luggage. Even if it did, it would be very uncomfortable. Besides, after all the effort it took to get here I have no desire to return back to Earth so soon.’

‘Okay,’ agreed Kitty happily.

February shook her head sadly. ‘It could be very dangerous over there; you must do everything I say and always let me lead the way. I know how to use my nose. You don’t. Speak only in whispers if you have to speak at all. I want to get in and out without them even realizing we were ever there.’

‘Agreed,’ Kitty told her in a whisper.

February then reached into the room with her arm in much the same way as Myajes had earlier, only instead of pulling it out again she moved it around as if confirming for herself that it was still working. Then she chanced her leg and repeated much the same checks. Then, moving very slowly as she built up the courage, she closed her eyes and stepped through the gateway into the room beyond.

Well, she seemed to still be alive
, and she seemed to be in the room they had seen through the gateway. So far so good. Without taking much of a look at the room she turned back to face the gateway. Myajes was near the back of the room; he had stood up and was looking her way in surprise. It was obvious he could still see her, and indeed she could see him as if there were no more than a few feet between them.

Then Kitty stepped into the room and likewise turned round. She waved happily to the figure of Myajes in the room she had just left.

Myajes approached the gateway and cautioned them, ‘If you’re sure you want to do this, then be very, very careful. If it is the Eschiff and they catch you, it’s unlikely they’ll give you any better treatment than the herd would.’

‘We’re going to find a window to confirm where we are, and we’ll check we’re dealing with Eschiff,’ February told him
. ‘If possible we’ll bring a prisoner back with us,’ she added, though she thought this last was unlikely. ‘Give us half an hour, though we could possibly do this in five minutes if luck is with us.’

‘Just be careful,’ Myajes replied simply, ‘and remember that if they are Eschiff we know very little about them and their capabilities, but there’s a good chance that their
sense of smell is as good as ours and they’ll sense you long before they see you.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ February commented
. ‘Maybe we should call the idea off.’

‘I’ll give you an hour before I leave this room. If the gateway is off your side when you get back to it
, then wait in the room you’re in. I think it belonged to our erstwhile friend here, so I don’t think you’ll be disturbed. You’ll be able to get out as soon as I reactivate the gate back on Earth.’

‘I really don’t want to return to Earth,’ February told him, ‘so we’ll be back as soon as we can.’

‘Good luck then,’ Myajes offered, and then he returned to his looting of the corpses.

With Myajes no longer the center of her attention, she noticed that the frame on this side of the gateway seemed to be permanently fixed to the wall. There was a small panel beside it that housed twelve buttons; each button had a different symbol on it. February had never seen those symbols before and couldn’t begin to guess what they meant, but she assumed that as a whole it was some sort of device for programming where the gateway went. This suggested
that there were two types of frame, those that were fixed in place, like this one, and which by the look of it could be programmable, and those like the one she had stepped through on Mars, a lot more mobile and potentially more versatile.

The room had looked reasonably large when looking into it from the surface of Mars, but now
that she was actually in the room, with Kitty by her side she felt a little bit cramped. It was only about five feet across, although it was maybe twelve feet long. There were alcoves on either side of the gateway. On each of the narrow walls on either side of the room was a door, looking much as any Earth door might, complete with handles and hinges. One of these doors was made of a bland-looking metal and appeared to be the main door that led out beyond the room. The other door was made of a gentle blonde wood and actually looked out of place in this room. Neither door had any visible lock, no card scanning machine, no fingerprint panel, no eye retina scanning device, nothing. 

There was no bed as such
; what there was had been hidden in one of the alcoves to the side of the gateway frame and resembled a hammock. It was pinned from the far corner of the room to the edge of the protruding wall that held the gateway frame and even so looked too small for the figure that February had so recently fought on Mars to use as a bed. There was a small plaque attached to the wall just above the hammock. Its color was similar to brass and was probably something very similar. The writing on it was black, and there was no doubt in February’s mind that it was in the same tongue as that on the panel beside the gateway.

Underneath the hammock was a small table with a few oddities. One of these was a holographic picture
showing a country scene filled with exotic trees and plants and two supposed Eschiff posing in the foreground. So that was what an Eschiff looked like! Only the top half of the two figures were visible in the holograph, so February was unable to compare their tails to her own, but they wore clothing similar to that which February herself might have purchased at any Earth-based clothing store. This of course only added to her doubt that what she was looking at was in any way genuine. But if it was a fake, then why hide it? The figures in the holograph were striped, much as the Herbaht were, although their stripes were at a slightly different angle and of a slightly different pattern than those February was used to seeing. It was a subtle difference, but a difference nevertheless, but then again, it was quite possible that a Herbaht could be born with stripes such as these. It was about the faces of the figures that the differences between their races were the most pronounced. The Eschiff had a small split in their top lip, and their faces were generally more elongated than those of the Herbaht. The noses appeared to be almost flat and lionesque, whereas the Herbaht nose was almost human in appearance; likewise, the Herbaht had humanoid ears on the sides of their heads, whereas the figures in the holograph showed them growing out the top of the head and again pointy and very feline in appearance. Whereas February and Kitty and every other Herbaht had yellow eyes, one of those in the image had blue eyes. Each of the two figures seemed to be covered in a very short, very plush fur. And to cap it all, the image seemed to be of a male and a female, but both of them were sporting small moustaches. 

February had spent most of her life being referred to by herd as a cat as if she was somehow some sort of anthropomorph. Now she held in her hands an image of a race that was supposedly related to them in some
way, if only through their religious stories. And the images on the picture were far more feline than anyone of her own race she had ever met. To say that she found the image disturbing would have been an understatement.

Indeed, she was unwilling to even consider that the picture might be real. As she thought about it, holographs were easy to play around with
, and just because she had a picture of two supposed Eschiff didn’t mean she was convinced that there really were any such creatures. She could create a similar mock-up herself if it came to it, better even.

She took the picture anyway and stepped in front of the gateway. ‘I’m not happy that this is proof,’ she commented to Myajes
, who hadn’t moved far from where she had last seen him. ‘To me, this shows only that someone might be trying to make us believe the Eschiff are here. But you might want to take this with you when you return to Earth.’

Myajes came and took the
holograph. He examined it for a moment and nodded. ‘I wouldn’t be convinced either, especially with what appears to be the rear end of a horse in the background.’

‘I didn’t see that,’ February commented
. Somehow that statement vindicated her belief that it was a fake. She took the holograph back and looked for what Myajes had meant. Well, it wasn’t much of a horse, little more than the tail and just a touch of rump, really, although clear enough to be identifiable as a horse. It could be overlooked, as February had done, and so, apparently, had the creator of the thing. The artist had obviously chosen a place with many exotic plants, hoping they would be enough of a distraction to convince someone of its authenticity—a botanical garden, perhaps. February was convinced that it had been taken somewhere on Earth.

February handed the picture back
. ‘I’ll see what else we can find. We’ll probably find out we’re in an underground bunker somewhere just outside of London,’ she said, although personally she still felt that the moon was still the most likely location. There had to be some reason it had been closed to the public.

Myajes took the picture and returned to what he had been doing.

The next item, moving from the hammock to the other side of the room, was the wooden chair sitting right in front of the gateway. It was small and was indeed made of wood. It had been positioned right in front of the gateway so that the person using the chair could see through to wherever the gateway happened to be programmed for, in much the same way that someone might sit and watch the newspaper. February pondered the reason why a chair would be sitting here in front of the gateway where it would most likely get in the way when someone stepped in or out through it. Then it occurred to her: the gateway wasn’t just a mode of transport from one place to another; it was also used as a means of communication. No wonder the hammock was out of sight of the gateway and possible incoming calls. February assumed there had to be a lock of some sort that could be applied to this end of the gateway in case the owner wanted peace.

At first what February saw on a table in the opposite alcove, she had thought was a simple country scene
. An image floating about an inch above the top of a table seemed to be of a camera moving slowly through a forest.

Kitty was already looking at it
, and she showed that the image had no substance at all by moving her hands across the space it occupied and not disturbing it.

There was nothing about the table to suggest there was any sort of computer or even machine on it, but something about the image seemed to scream ‘
Screensaver
’ at her. Computers were always of interest to February, yet there seemed to be no way to operate it, and frankly, nothing more than a superficial feeling that it might be computer-related. She spent a few minutes watching the picture as it completed a loop and then moved away from it. They only had a limited amount of time here.

‘We should probably move on from this room as soon as possible
,’ she commented. ‘I want to see one of these creatures for myself as well as find that window to see where we really are.’

Next February headed over towards the wooden door and opened it slowly as if unsure of what might lay beyond, but when she caught a glimpse of what was there she opened it the rest of the way without hesitation. It was a toilet and bathroom, made in exactly the same style as those on Earth
, and if anything it looked a little on the antiquated side, using water to flush away the waste matter rather than the more common waste disposal systems. More proof, February told herself, that this was the herd trying to take advantage of a Herbaht superstition.

The other door led out into a narrow corridor
along which the two of them could barely walk side by side. There were metal plates underfoot, and every so often one of these would give a little under their weight and pop back with an audible ‘bop’ as they stepped off again. The walls on either side were also made of a dull grey metal, with small air vents situated every ten feet or so and doors on either side of them every seven feet. Each door had a different symbol on it, some of which February recognized from the panel next to the gateway. They almost had to be numbers of some description.

‘Sleeping quarters,’ February whispered
, wishing her feet would make less noise than they were.

Kitty didn’t repl
y. The smell of fear was strong from her, and February wondered if they shouldn’t head back to the room so Kitty could wait for her on Mars. With every ‘bop’ that the floor plates made after the release of pressure from either of them, Kitty winced visibly.

At the end of the corridor there was a choice to go either to the left or the right along yet more corridors. The corridor to the left only went a short way and then seemed to disappear down a set of steps,
while the other way curved gently to the right and out of sight.

At this point Kitty was actually shivering with fear
, and that made February’s mind up. ‘Okay, we’re going to go back to the room we entered and return you to Mars. You can wait there with Myajes for my return and ensure he doesn’t get carried away and dismantle the gate before I get back.’

‘But…’ Kitty started to protest.

‘No arguments, I can smell the fear coming off of you,’ February explained. ‘You can wait for me with Myajes.’