Moonsteed (21 page)

“Oh, that’s very impressive.” Vladimir folded his arms awkwardly in his armor. “Now if there’re guards or someone at the bottom, and that hits them on the head, they’ll know we’re coming.”

Verity pulled the climbing ropes out from her bag, and hammered the pegs into the ice at the top of the shaft as she’d done when she’d climbed into the crater in search of Anthony Cornelian’s corpse.

“I take it we’re not using the lift.” Vladimir pointed to the pulley system and a console on a pole beside the hydrogen pipe.”

“No. It might register on the ANT if we use it. You said you don’t know how to abseil. Are you ready to learn?”

“I guess I’d better be.” Vladimir dropped his arms to his sides.

Abseiling down was far easier than climbing the scarp. Even Vladimir seemed to adapt to it quickly, and before long they were both at the bottom of the shaft. The lift from the surface--a rickety, cage-like thing with rime all over it--sat in the middle of the space at the bottom.

Verity removed her abseiling harness. Three tunnels radiated outward from the base of the shaft, equidistant from each other. When Verity removed her helmet, she detected the slight noise of ventilation fans and a faint draught, emanating from one of them.

“It’s this way,” she said quietly, putting her helmet back on. Confined places like this must need good ventilation if people were working in them. She pondered this idea, wondering if there was any way she could easily suffocate Farron in his lair.

“There’s a hydrogen pipe going down here too,” Vladimir remarked.

“Quiet,” whispered Verity. “There might be people nearby.”

The tunnel ended with a blockage of white foamy wall, as though a giant cork had got stuck inside it. The wall had a door in it with a receiver that would open it if the correct thought-prompt was given.

“
You still have that manual override key you grave-robbed
?”

Verity transmitted an exasperated thought. “
It wasn’t a grave, it was the bottom of a crater, and I needed it to finish your mission. And yes I do have it
.” She detached the key from her belt and sank the plug into the door socket beneath the receiver, giving it a sharp forty-five-degree twist. The door opened.

Verity stepped through, beckoning Vladimir in behind her when she was sure the corridor behind was empty. The door clicked shut after him. The walls in this part had been lined with some kind of foam insulation, to keep the warmth in and prevent the ice from melting, she supposed. Verity pulled off her helmet, wordlessly put her index finger to her lips and motioned for Vladimir to follow her.

As they continued into the depths of the catacombs that had lain unnoticed beneath the Callisto base all the time Verity had lived here, they passed doors, alternately on either side. The windows in them mostly revealed rooms in darkness, although a few were lit and contained scientific equipment and furniture strewn around, as though the denizens had only recently moved in and had not yet had time to unpack properly. As she passed yet another dark room, Verity noticed an odd glow, and when she stopped by the door she distinguished lights from computer equipment, and many cylinders illuminated with dim green light from within like a lava lamp shop.

There was no lock on this door, and it opened when Verity pulled the handle. She stared in the dark room as she entered, trying to make out the shapes inside the forest of glass cylinders. Each one stood on a stub, like the stump of a tree bole, covered with wiring and the glow of indication lights and monitoring equipment. The cylinders seemed to contain some sort of liquid, more wiring and objects, hard to see clearly with the room in total darkness and the bases of the cylinders shone with that green under-glow. As she crept closer to the nearest row of them, she realized what they were--fetuses.

The nearest hung supported by a plastic ring secured by spokes to the walls of the tank. A ganglion of wires spread from the mooring, reaching to various points on the surface of the skin. The slimy gray rope of the umbilical cord wound around the suspended body and descended to a pulsating, amorphous mass lying in the bottom of the cylinder. Shunts, jacks and plastic tubing protruding from the living tissue of the placenta led to pipes and cables running up through the base stand. Another umbilical cord--a fiber-optic cable--stretched up from the stand and looped through the torus supporting the fetus, up through a ring at the top of the tank where it curved down and connected with the forehead. The muzzle of the face protruded unnaturally under the bulbous grey shadows of the unformed eyes.

Vladimir’s breathing sounded loud in the quiet hall. “It’s not human.”

Verity stared at the fiber-optic vine growing from the fetus’ forehead, at the point where a neural shunt would go. Involuntarily, she found herself reaching with her fingers to her own forehead and her neural shunt behind the electromagnetic blindfold. Flickers of color raced back and forth within the translucent walls of the cable. A chill spread down her back, transforming into a dull ache in her intestines. “It’s born knowing what to think.”

She started and turned at a muffled noise from behind the door through which they’d entered. Footfall rang dully in the corridor.

Without a word, they both crossed the room to the door on the far side, passing a row of fetuses lined up in order of size. Verity pulled open the door and they darted across the corridor and into another room. She hadn’t had time to check through the window first, and they’d entered via a door at the back of a room filled with chairs, like a lecture theater where a man sat, his back to them, in one of the chairs at the front. Verity froze, dropping her hand on Vladimir’s wrist to make him do the same.

The man’s wiry sable hair showed over the top of the headrest, hair Verity knew.

“
Sir
?” She took one step toward him on the aisle down the side of the room. “Commodore Smith?”

He didn’t move, and as she came closer, bringing herself alongside the front row, she could see how his head slumped against the headrest, the slackness of his wrists on the chair’s arms where leather cuffs bound them. More straps restrained his legs and waist, and something held up his head. It was an inquisitor’s chair. They were all inquisitor’s chairs, arranged in rows like seats in a cinema.

A goggle-like mask with opaque lenses covered Commodore Smith’s eyes, and wires ran up the back of the chair, terminating in foam-covered plugs blocking the man’s ears. More wires tangled over the top of the head restraint and connected directly to his neural shunt.

As Verity stared, a muscle in the Commodore’s limp face spasmed briefly.

“Is he unconscious?” she whispered.

“It looks like he’s been drugged,” said Vladimir.

She counted chairs--enough to process sixty at once. And there could be more rooms just like this. The area beneath the base was riddled with tunnels left over from the terraforming. There was no limit. Verity found her gaze wandering from the Commodore’s inert figure, following the thick bundle of cables running lengthways along the middle of the floor to the wall the chairs faced. Lights flickered in its recesses, and screens and keyboards lay about the table before it. Masses of cables scrambled like malignant growths of ivy across the exposed ports, and a faint warmth and hum of machinery emanated from the wall.

“It’s an ANT,” Verity realized. “He’s got another ANT down here, and he’s using it for
this
.”

She thrust her helmet into Vladimir’s hands, and reached out to the Commodore, meaning to rip those jacks out of his neural shunt.

“No!” said Vladimir. “The ANT will know and you’ll set off an alarm!”

She stared at him. “You need to get out of here.”

“Verity, I said I’d help you.”

“You can’t help me. You can’t help me go any farther than here.”

Vladimir’s face grew twisted and tense. “What, you think I’ll hold you back, because I’m not Sky Forces?”

“No, it’s not that. I don’t want him doing this to you. I can’t be brainwashed by Farron. You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand? No one’s
immune
to indoctrination. You’re made of flesh and blood like everyone else.”

“Vladimir, there’s something you don’t know.” Verity gazed at the slightly plump cheeks and the softness under his jaw. His close-shaven, pale stubble was nearly imperceptible in this light, and it struck her how differently she regarded him from when they’d first met, and how right his face looked and how right his body and hands felt. She thought back to how she’d mentally derided him in favor of her memory of Gecko, who in retrospect had been merely a passing fling, and Farron, about whom something unwholesome and devious hung that she’d perversely been attracted to, and how she’d treated him when the horses...

A surge of shame and self-disgust filled her chest. She’d ennobled what was worthless, what was nothing, and treated with contempt what was good and worthy, someone who deserved better than that, who was better than that. She had acted without thinking, just as she had when she’d decapitated Anthony Cornelian. And now his eyes, glacial blue, beheld her with a perception she had not earlier noticed, and before him she felt exposed even more so than when she had been naked and at the point of orgasm with him.

“Vladimir, you remember when you came into the stables the first time and you called me Zeta?”

Vladimir’s face went red. “I already said I was sorry! The ANT said that was what your name was. It was just a mistake.”

“It is my name.” Verity sighed. She wished she didn’t have to tell him this, but that wouldn’t stop it being true. “Well, sort of. It’s not a name, it’s a number. Zeta comes after Epsilon. Epsilon was the last of Pilgrennon’s children. I was born as a genetic engineering project from the sperm of Delta and an artificial ova with a genetic code cut and pasted together on a computer. That means I’m Jananin Blake’s grandchild. I’m supposed to have genes that make hypnosis and that kind of thing impossible. It was part of the project.”

Vladimir stared back at her for what seemed a long time, his expression changing from disbelief to pensiveness, then back to disbelief. “Even if there are genes for such things and you have them, there’s a massive nature versus nurture argument, especially since this is humans we’re talking about.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time to talk about scientific theories now. I was born to do this. I was trained to do this, and I’ve got a debt to pay. You don’t have any of those things, and I don’t want to put you in danger anymore. I need you to find some evidence you can take with you to prove what’s going on here, and get back to the sun-yacht. Radio Torrmede and make sure the Magnolia Order and the Sky Forces know what’s happened. I’ll deal with Farron.” Verity had a sickening vision of what would happen if Vladimir got caught, Vladimir bound to one of those chairs, unable to move while insanity mantras were chanted into his ears and indoctrination images wired directly into his visual cortex until his own freewill was overwritten and yoked to that which would possess him.

“But I don’t know how to fly the lander,” he protested.

“Most of it’s handled by the computer. Just make sure you put the gyromag on before you start the engine.”

Vladimir bared his teeth in distaste, lines forming on his forehead. “No. I’m not going off without you.”

“Just go to the lander and wait. You’ll be all right getting out without an override because all the doors have fire escape buttons. If the sun rises and I’m not back, it’s too late for me and it’s too late for Callisto. The Meritocracy needs to know, and it’s your duty to tell them.”

Vladimir started to say something, but Verity smothered the words with her mouth, wrapping her arms around him. The armor they both wore deadened the feeling of their embrace while she craved the comforts of his flesh.

She pulled away from him and stepped back. He didn’t look away from her as she backed toward the door. She jacked the override into the port and turned it, then she was through and the door divided him from her. As she moved into the corridor, hand on her katana and keeping against the wall, she realized she didn’t have her helmet. She’d given it to Vladimir. That meant an unpleasant ride back to the lander if she did get out of here alive. She considered going back for it, but fear of being unable to leave him again put the idea from her mind.

“
You know what you told him was a load of bollocks really
?” Skepticism tinged Anthony’s thought. “
Genes won’t safeguard you from what Farron does
.”

“
You don’t know that. You’re not a scientist. I was made as an experiment, and the person who ran the lab’s theory might have been right
.”

“
Well, yes I do know that, actually. You think only one experiment of that nature was ever attempted? The Magnolia Order isn’t stupid. They’ve thought of that already
.”

“
I was told they wouldn’t be pursuing the research any further. What are you saying
?”

“
There wasn’t just one research group. There were two rival ones fighting over the funding. You think you’re oh so special and facing all this angst by yourself, that no one else in the history of life on Earth has ever had to deal with. But you’re not
.”

Verity stopped, hand touching the freezing wall. “
So what? Now you’re saying
you’re
an experiment
?”

“
You just told him you were Delta’s progeny. The research group that created you managed to get some kind of highly unethical monopoly on Delta and Epsilon’s genetic code. My research group used Gamma’s DNA instead. If you’re Zeta and there aren’t any others I don’t know about, on which I am not at all convinced, then I am Iota
.”

“
What? How can you be Iota? Iota is the third letter after zeta, and you--Anthony Cornelian
--was
older than I am
.”

“
The research group that made you got the funding for the genetic stuff first
.
After they’d made an embryo, they didn’t have funding for the next part, and the law at the time was unclear. So the embryo that later became you went in the freezer. A few years later, the rival company got funding and permission for genetic research and implantation and created myself and two others. A few years after that, the first company got more funding and implant permission
.”