Redlaw - 01 (41 page)

“Gail Macarthur,” said Redlaw, “you are under arrest for the attempted unlawful dusting of—”

“You can’t arrest anybody,” she crowed. “You’re not even a shady any more. You’re a sad wee nobody, is what you are. Look at the state of you. A half-dead loser who’s gone soft on vamps, thanks to that shtriga slut you were fooling around with. At least she’s gone now. It was a pleasure to watch the bitch burn.”

Her face took on a wheedling, mock-pitying expression.

“Och, did I hurt your feelings there, reminding you of your undead girlie? Tell me, what’s it like screwing a vampire? Is that the only way you can get it up, that shrivelled old dick of yours, when the lady’s stone-cold and dry as a bone down under?”

“We never—”

But before Redlaw could finish the riposte, Macarthur dived for the SHADE officer nearest her, yanked his Cindermaker out of its holster, and blasted three times at Redlaw. All of the shots missed him but one struck Aaronovitch in the chest, and the impact sent both him and Redlaw crashing to the floor.

In the confusion that followed, as Redlaw lay pinned under Aaronovitch, further shots were fired. There was shouting, screaming, the sound of things breaking. Finally he managed to disentangle himself from the corpse and throw it off him, to discover that another of the SHADE officers was dead, one had a bullet wound to the arm, and the third was crouched behind a chair, face contorted with terror.

There was no sign of Macarthur.

“The Commodore, she’s crazy,” said the injured shady. “She started blasting away, then ran out.” He pointed to a glass-fronted case mounted on the wall. It had been smashed open. “Took that with her.”

A fire axe, which had been hanging on spring-clips in the case.

Redlaw launched himself out of the control bunker, spotting Macarthur immediately; she was sprinting towards the foot of the maintenance ladder, which hugged the contour of the dome from base to apex. She leapt onto it and began clambering up, the fire axe dangling from her belt.

It didn’t take a genius to work out what she proposed to do. Since she couldn’t make the glass panes see-through, the next best thing was simply to smash them individually.

Redlaw ran after her and hauled himself up onto the ladder. The first couple of dozen steps were pretty steep, but thereafter the rising curve shallowed out and the going became easier. It helped that there were safety rails on both sides, affording handholds.

As he climbed, Redlaw noticed switch-boxes positioned at regular intervals along one of the safety rails, each with a green pressure button and a red stop button. The underside of the ladder was fitted with wheels running along grooved tracks encircling the dome. The entire ladder must be able to move, then, swinging around the dome. The switch-boxes enabled maintenance workers to ‘drive’ it.

Halfway up, a good two hundred and fifty metres above ground level, Macarthur glanced over her shoulder. Looking unsurprised that Redlaw was pursuing her, she pulled the Cindermaker from her waistband and fired twice. Redlaw flattened himself against the steps. Both shots missed, but one ricocheted off the safety rail just inches from his head, hair-raisingly close.

When no further shots followed, Redlaw peered up and saw Macarthur cursing in frustration. Out of bullets. She didn’t have a spare clip, so she tossed the Cindermaker away. The gun skittered and clattered down the dome, while Macarthur resumed climbing.

Redlaw followed. He himself had only the one Fraxinus round left. Better make it count.

Within a minute Macarthur was near the summit of Solarville One. The rungs of the ladder were almost level with one another. She tugged the axe out from her belt and leaned over the safety rail. Taking a double-handed grip on the haft, she swung the blade down onto one of the topmost hexagonal panes. The glass was thick and toughened, designed to withstand the worst the elements could bring, and it took her a few blows to penetrate it. Once she did, however, knocking out the rest of the metre-wide pane was relatively easy. She turned her attention to the next pane down and started to repeat the process.

Redlaw had by now made up the gap between them. He halted within a few metres of Macarthur, panting hard. His Cindermaker was out and levelled.

“Enough, Gail,” he said. “That’s enough. Stop right there.”

Macarthur paused, axe poised. “It isn’t enough. I won’t stop until I’ve shattered every single pane. Listen. Hear that?”

Faintly, from below, there were screams. Some of the vampires must have been caught in the shaft of sunlight now lancing down from the glassless aperture in the dome. Beneath his feet, Redlaw saw tiny figures scurrying about, panicked as ants when a small boy focuses a sunbeam on them through a magnifying glass.

“You know what that’s the sound of?” Macarthur said. “A good start.”

“Why?” said Redlaw. “Why do this?”

“Haven’t you figured it out?”

“Apparently not. That’s the reason I’m asking.”

“For her,” Macarthur said. “Róisín.”

“Leary?”

“How many other bloody Róisíns do we know? They killed her. Bastard vampires killed her. Took her from me, and since I can’t get her back, I’m going to get my own back on them. I’m going to dust a thousand of them, because she was worth a thousand of them. Fair exchange.”

“But there’ve been at least a dozen shadies who’ve died on your watch,” said Redlaw. “More. It’s an occupational hazard. Yes, Leary was an exceptional officer, but why her in particular? Why’s she the one who has to be avenged and not any of the others?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand, John. It’s something called ‘love.’ It’s what happens between people who have feelings and are capable of expressing them. An alien concept to you, of course.”

“You... and Leary?”

“Ding! The lightbulb pops on above his head.” Sudden tears glistened in Macarthur’s eyes. “I loved that woman. She loved me. Of course, we had to keep it secret. Fraternising within the ranks—frowned on. It would’ve probably cost me my job if anybody had found out, and Róisín’s prospects for promotion would have been shot. I think Khalid knew, or maybe he just had an instinct about us, sensed something that offended his religious sensibilities, tweaked his deviance radar. I think a couple of others might have had their suspicions too. But funnily enough, not Leary’s best friend. You had no idea.”

“I didn’t even know she was a...”

“You can say it. Lesbian. What you’ll find is, some of us are better at hiding it than others. Some of us have to be. Strict Roman Catholic community like the one Róisín grew up in, it didn’t do for a girl to admit she prefers girls. The nuns at her convent school would have tried to flog it out of her if they’d known. So she acted straight, but by God, when we were together, she was anything but. Best sex of my life, John. The love of my life as well.

“We were going to grow old together. Once we’d both done our stint with SHADE and collected our pensions, we were going to buy a cottage near Brighton and become a pair of fat, crotchety old tuppence-lickers with too many cats and a kitchen garden full of veggies. It was all going to be so wonderful.”

Macarthur made no move to wipe the tears from her cheeks, but nor did she sob. Her voice remained steely and even as she said, “I miss her every day. Every minute of every day. Undead scumbags stole my future from me. They have to pay for that.”

“But then why kill Lambourne? Leary’s death had nothing to do with him.”

“Use your head. I’m messing with Solarville One, his baby. On the very first day this little money-spinner of his goes into action, I come along and deploy the failsafe—or at least I would have, no thanks to you. How do you think the public would have reacted, knowing this isn’t just a place of detention, but has the capacity to be a death camp, a vampire Belsen? Not very favourably, I’d imagine. I doubt he’d have got to build the other fourteen. The PM would have torn up the contract and pretended he never knew and done his best to distance himself from the whole affair.”

“So?”

“So, Nathaniel Lambourne is the last person I’d ever want pissed off at me. Look how you’ve ended up, and you barely cost him a penny with all your shenanigans. Me, I’d be costing him millions. There’s nowhere on earth I’d be safe from him. He had to die. The neck wound was a nice touch, don’t you think?”

“Police might suspect a Sunless did it?”

“Oh, not for long, but they might to begin with, and that would make them very excited. Cops love a bit of vamp action if they can get it. Best-case scenario, it would throw them off the scent long enough for me to make my play here, then abscond, never to be seen again. The biggest irony of all is, the failsafe was my idea. I convinced Lambourne to put it in. I told him at the very least it could be used to singe the ’Lesses’ tailfeathers, if they ever got uppity or out of hand. Just lighten the glass a fraction, for a handful of seconds, to remind them who’s boss. It would be an effective method of sanction, as well as a selling point. He came round to it eventually. All my work.”

She lofted the fire axe again.

“And now I’ve just got to go about letting the sunshine in the old-fashioned, manual way.”

“No,” said Redlaw. “I can’t allow you to.”

“Shoot, then. Just remember, I’m doing this in memory of a woman we both, in our own ways, thought the world of.”

Redlaw took aim. He had no alternative. Like it or not, he was a shtriga now. The vampires in the dome were under his protection. Besides, Leary would surely not have wanted Macarthur to destroy them in her name. The Róisín Leary he remembered was more forgiving than that.

Macarthur brought the axe down, and Redlaw fired.

She’d outsmarted him, though. Instead of chopping into a pane, Macarthur righted the axe at the very last instant and slammed the end of the haft onto the green button on the switch-box just in front of her. The ladder began to roll sideways with a sudden, sharp lurch, throwing Redlaw against the safety rail. His shot went wild, and even if he’d had any more bullets in the magazine, Macarthur wasn’t about to give him a chance to use them, as she came bounding down the ladder, swinging the axe at him.

Redlaw threw himself out of the axe’s path, lost his footing, and began slithering down the ladder. Macarthur ran after him, hacking frenziedly, the axe blade sparking as it bit steel. Redlaw was obliged to keep propelling himself downwards on his belly to avoid the blows. The empty Cindermaker slipped from his grasp, tumbling to join the other Cindermaker somewhere at the base of the dome.

“Just stay still!” Macarthur snarled. “Just die!”

Redlaw’s barely controlled descent was gaining momentum as the steps steepened. The ladder vibrated and juddered beneath him as it moved. Finally, helplessly, he was bounced out over the side. With a flailing hand he grabbed hold of the safety rail, but the ladder continued to sweep slowly round on its axis like the second hand of a giant watch, dragging Redlaw behind it.

Macarthur halted and lined up the axe blade with Redlaw’s hand. He let go just as she swung, the axe landing just where his fingers had been.

He was sliding, falling. He managed to catch himself by hooking his hands onto the lip of one of the dome’s struts. His feet scrabbled for purchase on another strut below.

Macarthur stepped off the ladder and began working her way carefully across the hexagonal framework towards Redlaw, leaning her body into the dome’s curvature for balance.

“Such a pest,” she was saying. “You’re as bad as one of them. A plague on me, on all of us. You need to be got rid of.”

Redlaw had almost nothing left. All his weapons were gone and little strength remained in his limbs. He was some three hundred metres up, clinging to the face of Solarville One for dear life, with an axe-wielding maniac stalking towards him bent on murder.

That was when he felt his crucifix pressing against his chest.

Leary:
“See, the thing is, as with everything where God is concerned, it might not be what you want, but it might just be what you need.”

Redlaw yanked the crucifix over his head, then twined the chain around one hand. Macarthur was now within arm’s length of him.

“Going to scare me off with that thing, are you?” she snorted. “You really have lost it, John. I’m not one of
them
.”

She lashed out at him clumsily, one-handed, clinging to the side of the dome. Redlaw deflected the axe with his chain-wrapped fist. Then, as Macarthur was drawing her arm back to take another shot, he snapped the crucifix out like a whip. The heavy cross smacked Macarthur full in the nose, with a loud cartilaginous
crack
.

Briefly blinded by pain, Macarthur whirled the axe weakly at him. Redlaw caught the haft and reversed the blow back at her. The haft twisted out of her hand, the axe head dropped, and the blade sank into her thigh.

Macarthur shrieked as blood spurted from the cleaved muscle. The axe pulled itself free and dropped away, spinning end over end. Macarthur slid after it but was able to stop herself. Several panes below Redlaw, her arms braced on two struts, teeth clenched, eyes wild, she hung grimly on.

“John,” she said, looking up. Her voice was a trembling croak. “John, I can’t hold on. I’m slipping.”

Blood poured from her leg. The axe had nicked an artery.