Manhattan in Reverse (30 page)

‘I like the whole underground citadel thing,’ Paula said, looking round the office with its drab ceiling and dilapidated couch. ‘Quite the retro Criminal Mastermind secret headquarters.’ Her abdominal OCtattoo showed her the four of them were exchanging data at a huge rate, all of which originated from the ornamental arrays round their necks. She opened the additional bioneural chips in her cortex and started recording their emissions.

‘Why are you here?’ Volkep asked.

‘I talked to Dr Friland.’

‘Ah,’ Svein said, an exclamation simultaneously uttered by his youthful clone.

‘You fired the missile on Nova Zealand,’ Paula said.

‘Well that’s open to debate.’

‘In fact I suspect your nest
is
the Free Merioneth Forces in their entirety.’

‘Not completely. My Foundation colleagues are fully supportive in every respect.’

‘I see.’

‘Would you like to arrest them as well?’

‘I might get round to it.’

‘I’m fascinated how you got here. Did you come back before or after the wormhole closed?’

‘After. You killed a lot of Sheldons.’

‘Old concept,’ the East Asian youth said dismissively. ‘They’re all alive today.’

‘Interesting,’ Paula said. ‘Did you know your inflections are the same?’

Svein walked round in front of her. ‘Did you know I don’t care? Why are you here? Even with Sheldon support you can’t possibly expect to snatch all of me back to the Commonwealth. After all, you don’t even know how many of me there are.’

‘True. Did you get hot while you waited for the plane to take off? I did while I was out there. That desert has a terrible climate.’

‘You’d have to send a small army here for that, and even if Sheldon was determined enough there’s no guarantee he’d succeed. Were you sent to try and find out how much I’ve grown?’

‘I don’t care how many there are in your nest. Was the missile heavy when you lifted it up and aimed it at the plane?’

‘What do you mean you don’t care? Why are you here? Why did you break in to my home? Is it to snatch data on me?’

‘I have all the data I need. It was the reason for the Isolation which puzzled me. Now I know it wasn’t a financial or political ethos it makes perfect sense. Did you build the missile here? Did it kick when you launched it? Was the exhaust plume loud?’

‘Not political?’ Svein said it, but all four of the nest raised their eyebrows in unison, sharing the same slightly mocking expression. ‘What could be more political than developing a new kind of life, effectively a new species?’

‘Friland called you obsessional,’ Paula said. ‘I think he’s right. Did you actually watch the plane falling out of the sky? I bet you did. Who could resist that, no matter what type of human you are.’

‘Paula,’ all four of him assumed a mock-indignant expression. ‘Are you trying to
provoke
me?’

‘Did you feel satisfaction when it exploded?’

‘Two can play this game. Did Friland tell you we’re related, you and me?’ The Svein body grinned.

The Volkep body stood beside Svein. ‘And he was the original,’ Volkep said, tapping Svein on the shoulder. ‘Our minds are rooted in the same ancestor, Paula.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she admitted. ‘Were you nervous when you ran back to the boat? That was a weak point. Someone might have seen you.’

‘Friland originally funded the Foundation from the clinic he used to run in Grenada back in the twenty-first century,’ Svein said. ‘He sold baseline germ treatments to wealthy Westerners whose own countries banned such tinkering. That way he amassed a massive germ bank, a good percentage of the wealthy and powerful people of the day came to visit at some time and have their children enhanced. Their money and DNA were a good foundation for his Foundation.’

‘Standing on Ridgeview station platform waiting for the train, you must have been buzzing on adrenalin,’ Paula persisted. ‘You’d know me or someone like me would have the trains stopped. You might have been stranded there, with the police closing in. No way to get back to Sydney and establish your alibi.’

‘I looked up the records in Grenada. Our ancestor is Jeff Baker, apparently he invented crystal memories. A famous man in his time. A very smart man, too. Friland needed that level of intelligence in his research team, which is why I was created from Baker’s old sperm samples. You, I imagine, require a similar analytical ability. A lot of other sequences were included, which is where we start to diverge, but genetically he’s equivalent to our grandfather. Which makes us cousins, Paula. We’re family. And you always thought you were unique, isolated and alone. You’re not, Paula. We not only share flesh, we think the same.’

‘Were you watching when my Directorate team arrested your Fiech body? Some clever little vantage point nearby, perhaps?’

Svein pressed his face up close to Paula, his mouth parting with an angry snarl. ‘That
obsession
you mock in me is exactly the same one that runs through you, Investigator Myo. Friland didn’t have to sequence it in to your genome quite as much as you were led to believe. It’s not artificial, it’s you. It’s your heritage. It’s my heritage. It’s what we are. And this is our world. You’re home, Paula. Welcome back.’

She smiled lightly. ‘I know what I am, and I know where my home is. Good luck finding yours.’

The Svein body took a half step back from her. All four of the nest were frowning in annoyance now. ‘Why are you here?’ they demanded in unison.

‘To ensure the sentence passed on Fiech is carried out in full,’ Paula told them.

‘I thought it had been,’ the Volkep body said coldly.

‘It hasn’t been yet, because you made sure that part of you didn’t remember. But memory’s a funny thing, it’s triggered by association. And your mind is shared.’ Paula gestured around at the empty air. ‘It’s all around us, if you know how to look.’ Her virtual hand touched Nelson’s communication icon.

‘I’ve got enough,’ she said out loud.

‘What . . .’ all four nestlings grunted.

The wormhole opened behind her, expanding out from a micron-wide point to a two-metre circle. Bright light shone through, silhouetting Paula’s naked body. She stepped backwards, crossing the threshold to be enveloped by the light. Lost her footing as Augusta’s slightly heavier gravity claimed her, and fell on her arse in a completely undignified manner. Svein and his nestlings never saw that. The wormhole closed the instant she was through.

She was sitting in the middle of the alien environment confinement chamber of the CST Augusta Exploratory Division, a huge dome-shaped chamber with dark radiation-absorptive walls. In front of her was the five-metre-wide blank circle of the wormhole gateway, its grey pseudo-substance emitting strange violet sparkles. Halfway up the curving surface behind her was a broad band of reinforced windows with the big operations centre behind it. Nelson Sheldon was pressed up against the super-strength glass, grinning down at her. Behind him, the hundred-strong staff controlling the wormhole were peering over the tops of their tiered rows of consoles, curious and eager to see the conclusion to their oddest operation ever. Tracking her movements on Merioneth and keeping the wormhole close by had stretched the machinery to its limit.

‘You okay?’ Nelson’s amplified voice boomed down from the ceiling.

‘Yeah,’ Paula said, climbing to her feet. ‘I’m okay.’

WHAT I KNOW REALLY HAPPENED

The court guards were utter bastards to me. After that idiot judge passed sentence they dragged me down to the holding cell while I shouted that I was innocent. They just laughed as they slung me inside. I heard them later. Deliberately. They said that the Justice Directorate had developed a suspension system that allows a tiny part of your mind to stay awake during the sentence, so you’re aware of each long year as it passes. It’s part of the punishment, knowing all the opportunities you’ve lost, the life you’ve missed.

Not true. Just another unisphere myth.

After they put me down on the bed in the preparation room. No. I’ll be honest. After they held me down. I fought them,
Damnit
, I’m innocent. I was a classic case of someone who went down screaming and kicking. They won’t ever forget me. It took six Directorate orderlies to hold me in place while the malmetal restraints wrapped round my limbs. And after that, I still shouted. I cursed them and their families. I swore vengeance, that in two and a half thousand years I’d become the killer they wrongly thought I was, and I’d hunt down their descendants and torture them to death.

No use. They still infused the drugs. Consciousness faded away.

I woke up. The room which slowly came into focus around me was very similar to the preparation room I’d gone to sleep in. Stupidly, I was bloody grateful that I hadn’t known all that time flowing round me. The waste of my potential lives. But I was alive. Warm. And pleasantly drowsy.

There was something round my neck which seemed familiar somehow, something from the time in my life I’d lost. Icons in my virtual vision were blinking green, showing the memorycell channels into my neural structure were wide open.

Then that queen bitch Paula Myo came in. I tried to get up to throttle her. That’s when I found I was still restrained, with malmetal coiled round my arms and legs.

‘What the fuck is this?’ I shouted. My voice was weak.

‘I had you woken,’ Myo told me. ‘I have something for you. Something you’ve forgotten.’

‘What? What is this?’

‘You,’ she said, and took off her suit jacket. Something was glowing underneath her white cotton blouse. I could see shapes moving.

‘Help,’ I cried. ‘Someone. Help me.’ The coloured shadows on her abdomen began to writhe faster and faster. My virtual icons changed from green to blue, showing incoming impulses.

‘What is that?’ I whispered in fright.

She glanced down, as if only now becoming aware of the light. Her smile made her face ugly. ‘A kind of prison, I suppose. You know, in ancient times, necromancers used to draw pentagrams to trap demons in. They thought that if they were imprisoned they could use their powers. A very misplaced notion, I suspect. In this case geometry isn’t important, I simply had to have a large receiving element. Your thoughts are big, after all. But I managed to catch them. Not all of them, just the right ones. Those that were relevant to the crime.’

‘My thoughts?’ The icons expanded abruptly, wiping out my sight. Then faces emerged through the blue mist. Four of them in some kind of dilapidated room. Faces I knew. Svein. I remembered him. I remembered . . . being him.

I was the one standing in the desert outside Ridgeview while the rest of me lived our life. It was hot out there. Bloody unpleasant, actually. The sun burned my arms and face. I took a leak against some local plant. That way if the forensic team were any good, they’d find it and confirm the Fiech body’s DNA.

Then the air traffic control data playing in my virtual vision showed me the plane was taxiing to the runway. I took a breath and got the missile ready. A simple thing really, three of me had built it in the engineering centre under the Lake Hill house. Most of the components were off-the-shelf, and the custom ones were easy enough for the bots to manufacture. We built quite a few.

The finished product was a simple blue-grey launch tube over a metre long, with a shoulder saddle and a handle. It was heavy when I rested it on my shoulder; I squatted down on the stony sand to make the weight easier. I could see the big old Siddley-Lockheed lift into the sky; with its engine rumble faint in the hot desert air. It took what seemed an age to climb up to its cruise altitude, curving round the city in a wide arc. The passenger list said it was just about full, over a hundred and thirty people. It would be quick. Death in such a fashion always is. And the passenger list confirmed the Dynasty scum were on board. The missile’s sensors locked on. There wasn’t anything else in the sky to confuse them.

I fired the missile. The bloody launch tube slammed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t been bracing myself it would have knocked me down. The roar of the solid rocket booster was obscenely loud. For a couple of seconds I was overwhelmed. It was like being hit on the side of the head. Smoke was seething all round me. I crouched, staggered about. Then I recovered enough to stand still and look up into the wide open sky. The hyper-ram had kicked in, which made the missile just about impossible to see.

I expected the explosion to be bigger. This was just a white pinpoint flash, no fireball. But behind the blaze, the plane started to disintegrate, tumbling out of the sky. Dark fragments twirling away from the main body.

There was no way I could move. Actually, my whole nest of bodies froze up as I watched the spectacle. There was something obscenely beautiful about the sight, and better still was the knowledge that I had created it. If I could do this, I could do anything. I’d be able to force through Merioneth’s Isolation now. I had the courage and determination.

The first fragments hadn’t even reached the ground when I turned and hurried down to the shore where the boat was anchored. This point was critical. The whole area would be swarming with people. The unisphere was already flinging out alarms. Rescue crews and police would be dispatched within minutes. And any local citizens nearby would no doubt rush to help. My Volkep body released the warning message into the unisphere as I reached the shoreline.