Noble Conflict (27 page)

Kaspar sighted over Voss, but he had no clear shot. He swung the rifle round to check the door. No shot there either. Just then, he spotted someone in the hall. He nearly fired, but he recognized the toe of a Guardian’s boot and the emitter of a stun rifle.

Yes! Reinforcements! Voss must’ve sent for backup after all.

Relief flooded over him as he spun again to face Voss, moving swiftly towards him. He had to get to Rhea before she could kill herself. The fact that her dagger was lying on the floor would help, of course, but she probably still had a gun.

When he reached Voss’s body and peered round the cabinets, all he could see was her foot disappearing over the top of the cabinet.

‘Damn, you’re fast!’ Kaspar fired, but all he hit was the ceiling. Then he was in pursuit, running back round Voss to head her off before she could reach the door. There was a blue flash. Kaspar was just in time to see Rhea collapse. Her fall to the floor was the only thing Kaspar had seen her do that wasn’t graceful.

He kept running to her, and knelt to check her pulse. She was alive, but her pulse was thready and weak. He turned to the door to see who his unexpected backup was. It was a Guardian, of course, but Kaspar didn’t recognize him straight away. He was heavier-set and older than most of Kaspar’s colleagues, but he was familiar. Then the Guardian removed his HUD and Kaspar recognized him at once.

Tilkian.

Instantly Kaspar knew what had happened. They had been betrayed. Probably by one of the nerds. Even nerds could be bribed or blackmailed, or just plain threatened. Tilkian knew that he was suspected and had followed them here to make sure his secrets remained just that. Kaspar knew there was only one thing he could do.
Hesitation would be fatal. He was younger, fitter and quicker – and Tilkian’s rifle wouldn’t have recharged yet. He threw himself backwards like a swimmer starting at backstroke, and while still lying on his back he took a snap-shot at Tilkian. The bright blue flash lanced out and struck the older man dead-centre. Tilkian didn’t move. In fact, he hardly blinked. He just stood there.

‘Wilding,’ said Tilkian. ‘Drop the weapon and stand up.’

Kaspar felt a little foolish. He had never known a person stay conscious after being hit by a charge from a stun rifle. Kaspar’s mind scrambled to think of something else – fast.

‘Guardian Wilding, apart from the fact that I’m wearing an electric-grounding mesh that makes me immune to your Mark Six light-show weapon, I’m also armed with the new Mark Seven stun rifle. During development, I believe they named it “electric napalm”. And on its highest setting it does more than stun. A lot more.’ Tilkian swung the rifle lazily towards Kaspar. ‘Now drop your weapon and stand up, unless you want to share your friend’s painful fate.’

Electric napalm – that didn’t sound good. ‘You’ve got it on its highest setting?’

‘Of course.’ Tilkian raised an eyebrow. ‘I knew who I’d be dealing with. Drop your weapon. I won’t ask you again.’

Kaspar reluctantly let go of his rifle and stood up. ‘Is Rhea going to die?’

‘Rhea? You’re on first-name terms with Insurgents now, are you? Don’t worry, she’s not going to die. That
would be too easy. But the Mark Seven will ensure that she’s in constant agony. An agony from which she’ll never wake. A fitting end, don’t you think?’ Tilkian patted his rifle. ‘This baby is going to save us all that medical faffing around at the Clinic. Get hit with a blast from one of these, and once you go down you stay down and your body is racked with an intense pain from which there is no cure and no escape. Magnificent, eh? Now pick up the girl.’

‘Why?’

‘I will have to stage-manage this scene to an extent.’

‘I meant, why should I help you?’

‘Because I am offering you a gift.’

At Kaspar’s puzzled look, Tilkian smiled unpleasantly. ‘The gift of a rapid and relatively painless death.’

Thanks for nothing.

‘Why the generosity?’ said Kaspar, desperately searching for an escape route.

‘Because it suits us both, Guardian Wilding. My own selfish reasons are many. I won’t have to kill you myself, I won’t have to get your blood on my just-cleaned uniform, I won’t have to conceal that a Guardian was stunned with a stun rifle and committed to the North Wing. It just works all round.’

‘And why should I help you avoid a little blood?’ Kaspar said bitterly. ‘You’re already up to your ears in it.’

‘Would you really prefer to linger in a drawer in the North Wing, watching high-definition films of rape and torture and mutilation and murder for the rest of your miserable, painful, artificially prolonged life? If you like I could
arrange for you to have the drawer next to your mother.’

Kaspar’s whole body froze momentarily as he realized what the commander was telling him. He lunged forward just as Tilkian took a step back, and swung his gun up to point directly at Kaspar’s head.

‘That’s far enough,’ said Tilkian.

Kaspar struggled to keep the revulsion off his face. His mum was at the Clinic  . . . Or was Tilkian just playing with his head? ‘Is my mum really in one of the drawers in the North Wing?’

‘Of course. Traitorous bitch! I put her in there myself.’ Tilkian smiled.

‘I’m going to rip your heart out,’ Kaspar hissed.

‘You’re welcome to try.’ Tilkian shrugged.

It took every gram of restraint Kaspar possessed to hold back, but he knew Tilkian would own him before he’d covered even half the distance between them.

Think, Kaspar, damn it. Think!

‘Pick up the girl,’ Tilkian ordered, his smile fading. ‘I’m getting tired of telling you that.’

Kaspar moved slowly towards Rhea. ‘Why do you do it?’

‘What?’

‘Why do you murder your own? Are you part of the Insurgency, committed to their cause – or are you just a mercenary scumbag looking out for number one?’

Tilkian laughed. ‘I thought you were the research genius. I was led to believe you had uncovered all our little secrets. I’m disappointed.’

‘So educate me then.’

‘Don’t insult me by supposing we’re a part of the Insurgency, with their namby-pamby attitude to casualties.’ Tilkian spat contemptuously towards Rhea’s body. ‘Surely you didn’t think someone like
her
could have planned all those bombings? It seems that people have severely overestimated your intelligence. Now pick her up.’

Kaspar bent and picked up Rhea. She hardly weighed anything. As he straightened up, he said, ‘Just tell me one thing. Why?’

Tilkian sighed, as if he was being pestered by a child. ‘Why did the Insurgency start, Guardian Wilding? Do you know your history?’

‘Yes, I know my history,’ snapped Kaspar. ‘I know that you are tearing apart a society you swore to protect by gassing school children and bombing innocent people. I’d just like to know
why
?’

‘I think we’ll have her over here, near the door. Paralysed, while fleeing the scene of your murder.’ Tilkian moved back a step. ‘As you’re so good at history, Guardian, tell me about the origin of the Badlands.’

Kaspar frowned.

‘Keep working while you speak. You have a choice. If you don’t want to work, we can always just skip ahead to the dying part.’

Kaspar bit back his bitter retort. He started carrying Rhea past where Voss’s body lay.

‘Generations ago,’ he said wearily, ‘the misguided technical geniuses of the east planted nukes deep in the Earth so as to change the way that the tectonic plates moved and
to create more land for themselves. It all went horribly wrong, their entire country was turned into a lava lake and about ninety per cent of them died.’

‘Actually, no. The death toll was more like sixty-eight per cent – but go on.’

Kaspar’s brow furrowed. ‘So they lived as nomads for years until they built up their numbers and recovered to an extent. That’s when they started up the Insurgency, to take our land away from us because they’d destroyed their own.’

‘Wrong.’

‘Wrong?’

‘Very wrong, Mr Wilding. Your grasp of history is as tenuous as your grasp on everything else. After the volcanic cataclysm, the survivors were homeless and starving. There was a huge exodus and millions of refugees streamed west to escape the lava.’

‘West? To where? There’s just  . . .’

‘That’s right. Here. Millions of refugees came here, to the place we call home – and they were allowed to settle in the south, near the Voren Lakes. A remarkable act of generosity, don’t you think? And they flourished. They became a nation within a nation.’

‘That’s not what I was taught. I don’t understand.’

‘No, of course you don’t. They rebuilt their scientific infrastructure really quickly. Secretly, of course. They weren’t trusted, and their access to nuclear materials was prevented. But they weren’t really interested in that kind of science any more. They had learned their lesson. Trying to manipulate the planet had been hubris, so in future
their plans would be  . . . more manageable. They started to develop a biological weapon. A binary virus, genetically engineered to be harmless to them but lethal to their enemies – their enemies being anyone who wasn’t one of them. And when the weapon was ready, they released it.’

Even preoccupied as he was, Kaspar listened avidly to what Tilkian was saying, though he was revolted by it.

‘The refugees repaid their hosts by unleashing a plague. Within a year, seventy-five per cent of their enemies were destroyed and the rest were fractured into tiny pockets of survivors, sick and demoralized. The binary virus ravaged their bodies and altered the DNA of a significant number of them. And when they were too weak to fight back, there was no more need for secrecy. The survivors were simply hunted down and killed. Only a few thousand escaped across the border into the Badlands.’ That was the true War to End All Wars – one-sided, brutal and mercifully short.

Behind Tilkian, Voss was stirring.

Kaspar’s head swam with the enormity of it. Tilkian had to be lying. How had he not heard any of this before? And yet it all sounded so plausible, backed up by Tilkian’s smug tone. Voss was silently rising to his feet behind Tilkian. Kaspar had to keep Tilkian’s attention away from his boss.

But how?

‘That can’t be right,’ said Kaspar. ‘If we were nearly wiped out and driven into the Badlands  . . .’

‘Not
we
, Guardian Wilding. Not
us
.
We
weren’t driven into the Badlands.
They
were.’

‘
They?
Who? Talk sense.’

Voss got up and started walking softly forward. Tilkian was oblivious.

‘The original inhabitants of this country, Guardian Wilding.
They
were driven out.
They
were forced to live in the Badlands. And ever since,
they’ve
wanted their country back.
That’s
what the Insurgency is about.’

‘But  . . . that would mean that we  . . .’

‘He finally gets it,’ Tilkian said with contempt. ‘
We
are the “misguided technical geniuses of the east” as you so colourfully put it.
We
stole this land.
We
came within a whisker of annihilating the people who lived here. The society you are so proud of is built on a genocide.’

Kaspar couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think what to say in any case. He tried not to give Voss away by looking at him. He stared at Tilkian and forced himself to say something to keep his attention.

‘What’s the problem, Wilding?’ smiled Tilkian. ‘Having trouble working out whose side you should be on?’

Voss moved up and stood next to Tilkian. Tilkian turned to look at him.

‘Abel.’ Tilkian nodded. ‘You’ve looked better.’

‘Grigor,’ replied Voss. ‘Still making speeches.’

Tilkian turned back to Kaspar. ‘I was just enlightening our young friend here about—’

Voss’s right hand shot upward towards the back of Tilkian’s neck and drove a thin steel spike between the base of the skull and the first cervical vertebra. Tilkian’s eyes widened in shock. His head reflexively tilted back as
the steel penetrated the medulla of his brain, where his heart and breathing functions were controlled. The strike was almost certainly fatal, but Voss made sure by plunging the thin-bladed dagger that he held in his other hand into the left side of Tilkian’s neck, and then slicing the blade forward, all with a single stroke.

It was as if Tilkian dropped through a trap door. His legs crumpled and he went down, vertically. His lifeless body pitched forward to land face down. A halo of blood started to form around his head.

Kaspar stood stunned. He’d seen plenty of dead bodies by now, but this was only the second time he’d seen someone die. Compared to this, the death of the guy in the desert and the suicide of the ninja at Wissant Avenue had been positively sterile. Even when he’d seen that Voss was conscious he hadn’t expected the end to be so brutal, so bloody. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Tilkian had given him so much information to process. But right now he had to focus.

‘Sir, we have to get Rhea out of here,’ Kaspar urged. ‘If Tilkian is here, the others of the SSG can’t be far away. We have to leave before his backup arrives.’

‘I’m afraid not, kid,’ said Voss, swinging his rifle to point at Kaspar. ‘
I’m
his backup.’

‘What?’ The look on Kaspar’s face was now beyond confusion. He was still supporting Rhea, like someone trying to dance with a partner who’d drunk too much, but Voss’s words brought him to a sudden standstill.

Voss pointed the rifle about a metre to Kaspar’s left and
fired. The main stun beam hit the cabinet, but Rhea and Kaspar were caught in the peripheral charge. It was like being hit by a train. Kaspar fell back and slumped, sliding down the cabinet until he sat on the floor with Rhea on top of him.

‘It’s a good trick that – shooting to miss. They don’t teach that one at the Academy,’ said Voss. ‘You get a partial stun, but because you didn’t get the main beam, no aftereffects that will show up in a post-mortem.’

Kaspar was tingling from head to foot. He tried to get up but his body was no longer his own.

‘I warned you that curiosity had to be kept on a leash. But thanks to you it has all worked out for the best.’