Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (27 page)

“Don't touch the line!” He strapped Everett into the zip-line harness, then took the one behind. “Brake is here; harness release is here. Don't mix them up.”

“Ready, Mr. Mchynlyth,” Captain Anastasia said. She was directly ahead of Everett on the line. Sharkey would make the run first. Mchynlyth touched a remote. The cargo bay door opened fully. Everett hung from the near-invisible line. In front of him the dark was filled with gusting snow. With his Confed war-yell, Sharkey launched himself into the night.

“Come on, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said. She smiled at him over her shoulder, then raised a hand, and in a moment was a tiny doll-figure hurtling towards the Goth-scape of the Tyrone Tower. Everett touched the brake. In a breath he was out in the air. The cold, the speed took his breath away. Snow smeared in his face; he wiped it away with frozen fingers. Beneath him were the rooftops, the chimneys, the electricity pylons and terraces and gardens of Bloomsbury. Someone had decked out a balcony with Christmas lights; here a Christmas tree had been fastened into a flag-holder; in this roof garden a man and woman stood, drinks in hand, looking up at the falling snow. They did not notice the line-riders crossing the sky. The line riders were specks among swirling specks. He was high, he was invisible, he was invulnerable. Everett flew through sound. London was a symphony around him; the traffic rumble beneath him, the hooting of car horns, the sound of pop music from apartments, the clank and clack of trains, distant emergency sirens, the distant purr of
Everness's
engines, the hiss of the line running through the diamond bearings on his harness, and now—coming in waves from far, and farther, and farthest—the bells of London Town, ringing out from the steeples and the spires and the belfries for Christmas. Everett glanced back. Behind, Mchynlyth rode the line. He looked as if he sat in thin air. He was grinning like a madman. Beyond him, flecked by snow, hung
Everness
. Her bridge twinkled with fairy-lights. Did he see a figure at the window? Everett snatched his attention away and looked ahead. The Tyrone Tower was coming up fast, a jagged wall of buttresses and cornices and long concrete finials and spires. Sharkey was already down on the twenty-second-floor balcony Everett had identified from his spy mission. Captain Anastasia came to a stop and dropped to the balcony below. Which was the brake, which was the release? Everett hit a button. Overhead the bearings shrilled as the brakes dug in. He came to a halt, swinging gently, looking up into the stern face of the stone guardian angel.

“Out of the way, ya bassa!” a voice shouted behind him. Everett hit the release and dropped to the balcony as Mchynlyth's boots whistled in over his head. In moments all four of the rescue mission were crowded together on the narrow balcony. Disturbed pigeons flew up, wings clattering.

“You did remember to bring…the youknowwhat?” Mchynlyth said.

Everett slapped his backpack. Sharkey had already picked the window lock. They stepped through into the half-built elevator lobby Everett had seen on Sen's spy-camera. The images on Dr. Quantum could not convey the smell of dust, concrete, plaster, wood.

“Lead on, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said. Everett called up his graphic of the Tyrone Tower and zoomed in on the twenty-second floor. He held the tablet up and compared the photograph with the reality.

“Through these dust sheets,” Everett said. He had set up Dr. Quantum so that the map reoriented at every turn of the corridor.

“Do you think there'll be guards?” Mchynlyth asked. He rested his hand on a pant pocket that bulged with the unmistakable outline of a thumper-gun.

“I didn't see any,” Everett said. Captain Anastasia raised an eyebrow. “I mean, Sen didn't see any.” But he did see Sharkey pull his coattails close around him, and that they moved heavily and stiffly, as if rigid steel barrels were stowed there. “Right here. This is the corridor.” The only difference between picture and reality was the chambermaid's trolley. “Last door on the left.” And now he was here. On the twenty-second floor, in the corridor, only a door between him and his dad. Yet again, it had been so sudden, with too much happening for Everett to be ready, to feel ready.

Captain Anastasia rapped on the door with a knuckle.

“Dr. Singh?”

No answer.

“'Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him,'” Sharkey said.

“Button it, Mr. Sharkey.” Captain Anastasia rapped again. “Dr. Singh. I am Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth of the LTA
Everness
. I have your son here with me; Everett.” She nodded to Everett.

“Dad?” Everett touched his cheek to the door. “Dad? Can you hear me? It's me, Everett. Are you in there?” No answer. Not a sound of movement from inside. What if he weren't there? What if he'd been taken away somewhere else while Everett shopped for Christmas dinners and escaped over rooftops and fought Bromleys and made rescue plans? What if he'd left it too long? They might have taken him to another, more secret and secure place; they might have taken his dad off this world entirely.

Captain Anastasia rapped the door again.

“Dr. Singh, I'd advise you to stand back. Mr. Mchynlyth, take it down.”

“Ma'am.” From another of his many pockets, Sharkey took a tool. He handled it carefully, as if it were a small and delicate but very venomous snake. He squatted down at the door lock. Everett could not make out what the device was; it looked very simple, two flat paddles the length of his little finger, as thick as a sheet of paper. Both tapered at one end to a fine point. Mchynlyth pushed both paddles into the crack between the door and the frame just above the lock, one above the other. The lower he pushed all the way until it vanished. He took a hook from another pocket and fiddled around under the lock, muttering under his breath, until he caught the paddle and pulled it out, underneath the deadbolt.

“Stand back,” he said, took a paddle in each hand, and pulled firmly towards himself. The door swung gently inwards. Mchynlyth held up a paddle. The second one swung below it, suspended on an invisible line. Nanofibre, Everett realised. “And that's why you keep yer fingers away,” Mchynlyth said. The lock bolt had been cut clean through.

Captain Anastasia pushed the door open. This was the first of a suite of rooms. The room was dark; Everett had a sense of sofas, chairs, work desks, a comptator station. A bicycle stood in a trainer rig. A Milani full-carbon Shimano headset road bicycle. A bicycle Everett had last seen going into the back of an Audi on the Mall. A door led to a more brightly lit room beyond. A figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light. It carried a table lamp in its hands like a weapon.

“Dad?” Everett said.

The figure raised a hand. Lights blazed on, blinding the rescue party. Everett blinked his vision clear. A short man, brown skin, brown eyes; slightly built, trim, not running to upper body fat like many middle-aged Indian men. He wore Canterbury track-bottoms and a T-shirt. His feet were bare, as if he had just got out of bed and pulled on what came to hand. Him. Him oh so him, completely him, utterly him, absolutely him. Then all thought ended and Everett rushed to his dad.

Tejendra raised the table lamp like a club.

“Stop there. I don't know who you are.”

“It's me. Everett.
Everett.”

“Yes. Maybe. But are you my Everett? My son?”

There is not one you
, Tejendra had said, on a fine summer night as they sat up on Parliament Hill, looking down over heat-hazy, lazy London.
There are many yous
.

“Of course I am!” Everett shouted.

“You would say that.”

He had told Sen that he thought Charlotte Villiers and the fair-haired man in the good suit were the same person in parallel worlds. Charlotte and Charles. They would think nothing of bringing another Everett Singh from another plane to fool Tejendra. Back, way back on his home world, Everett had drunk cappuccino on a rain-swept Covent Garden piazza while Colette Harte told him about a plane, E4, that was identical in almost every way to E10—apart from politics, and something that had happened to the moon. There could be an Everett Singh on that world.

“Believe me!”

“Convince me.”

Something only Dad and I know, Everett thought.

“We were going to the ICA to hear a talk on nanotechnology.”

“They know that. They took me from there.”

“White Hart Lane. Second of November. We beat Inter Milan 3 to 1. Gareth Bale scored a hat-trick.”

“Half of London remembers that game.”

“Vinny took a photograph of us. With pies.”

There was a silence.

“I need more,” Tejendra said.

“Cuisine nights!” Everett exclaimed. “You'd cook Thai.”

“Yes.”

“I'd cook Mexican.”

“What did you cook?”

“Chilli. With…”

“With what?”

“Chocolate.”
Chocolate in the chilli. Chilli in the chocolate
.

The lamp fell from Tejendra's hands.

“Son,” he said simply. “I'm sorry. I had to be sure.”

And Everett had no idea what to do, what to say. Maybe a hello. Maybe a good handshake. Maybe a cool line, like a character in a game. Maybe he should just punch him on the arm,
Hey Dad
. Then he went beyond knowing what to do and not knowing to what he felt. They hugged. They just hugged. They parted; they looked at each other. They hugged again. Everett crushed his dad to him, crushed him to him with all his strength, a never-letting-you-go hug. But it ended. It must always end, and it's embarrassing then. They stepped away from each other.

“You made it work,” Tejendra said. “The data set.”

“The Infundibulum,” Everett said. “Tying your shoelaces.”

Tejendra waggled his head, the old Punjabi gesture that meant yes/good/sort-of.

“I thought you'd get that.”

“And if I hadn't?”

“You'd have worked it out another way. Your dad knows you. Can I see it?”

Everett set Dr. Quantum on the desk. He clicked open the Infundibulum icon. The screen filled with the slow-turning, glowing knot-work of the Panoply of all worlds. Tejendra leaned over it. The display lit his face green.

“Fractal seven-dimensional sealed knots,” Tejendra said. There was a look in his eyes Everett had seen when Tejendra was explaining how the universe really worked to him. It didn't matter if Everett understood or not, what mattered was that Everett caught the light, felt some of the heat of his excitement. Science eyes: Tejendra was seeing the bigger universe, the way it all fit together: the wonder stuff. “Beautiful, beautiful work, Ev. Beautiful.”

This was a scientist's beautiful. Beauty was at the heart of physics: the laws of reality, the mathematics that explained them so precisely, were always simple, elegant, beautiful. True. Everett's heart swelled. There was no higher praise.

“Gentlemen, I don't mean to hurry you,” Captain Anastasia said.

Tejendra did not look up.

“Dad, we have to get out of here,” Everett said. “We have to get up to the gates.” Still, it was not over. He had to get up to the gate level. He had to power up a Heisenberg Gate and open it. He had to go through to Roding Road, step out of nothingness on Christmas Eve in his own living room, while Tejendra held the gate open. He had to bring them back, and go through the gate a final time, to a world far away, a place they would never be found.

“Dad!”

Tejendra snapped out of his fascination.

“Yes, let's go. I have the operating codes—I need them for the work they think I'm doing.” Still he hesitated. He picked up Dr. Quantum. “Everett, Captain, you gentlemen; whatever happens, don't let her have this. Charlotte Villiers. She would become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. There is a group inside the Plenitude; they call themselves the Order. They're politicians, diplomats, big businesspeople, media folk, military, some scientists, some religious. They want the Infundibulum. That's why they took me and tried to get me to re-create my work here. It would give them control over the Plenitude, control over the whole Panoply. They could project their power anywhere in the multiverse. There is something out there, something they stumbled across, something they must keep secret from us, but it's big and it's coming. They say they need the Infundibulum to give us the edge, to keep us secure. They always say that; it's to keep us safe, keep us secure. For our own good. Whatever happens, Ev, she must not have the Infundibulum.”

Tejendra handed the tablet to Everett.

The windows exploded inwards. Everett covered his head as glass showered around him. Figures in black swung through the shattered bedroom windows on lines and dropped to the floor. In the same instant more dark figures burst through the open doorway. Laser beams danced through the air. Mchynlyth dived, rolled, came up with his thumper drawn. Sharkey, only a heartbeat behind, went for his shotguns. His hands froze halfway to his holsters. A laser-sight drew a red dot at the centre of his forehead.

“'As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time,” he said. He slowly raised his hands. The soldiers moved quickly to encircle Tejendra and the
Everness
crew in a ring of gun muzzles and red laser light. Their weapons were black; their uniforms were black; they wore black soft caps on their heads. One of them, a woman with a blonde ponytail under her black cap, seemed familiar to Everett. Then he remembered where he had seen her before: one of the guards at the Channel Tunnel gate facility back on his Earth.

“Sharpies,” Mchynlyth said. “I hate sharpies.” Captain Anastasia did not speak at all.

The circle of soldiers parted. Two figures entered the suite. The first was a short, badly moving man in a shapeless coat and unpolished shoes: Paul McCabe. The second was Charlotte Villiers. She wore a wasp-waisted suit with a ruffle at one shoulder. Her small, severe hat had a short veil over her face. She looked like death in heels.

“At ease, soldiers.”

The SWAT team put up their weapons but stayed alert, ready for action.