Skyfall (3 page)

Again and again she reaches out desperately, searching.

Nothing.

Only the cold and the blue. The searing clear blue of the sky, just like the desert, but dead, no life anywhere.

Dariand!

Wanji!

Nobody answers. No earthwarmth tingles through her in response. No hint of ground or fire or smoke or dirt.

Just the sky.

The cold, distant sky.

And she falls again …

He was out over the field. The thrum of the resonators a lullaby as he soared through the vast, empty sky. Then the nightmare began with an urgent, warning screech from the main interface …

‘Shi!' Janil cursed, but before he'd finished spitting out the word his flyer started shuddering, pitching violently. His fingers flew across the main panel as he struggled to regain control, but nothing he did made any difference and the flyer was falling … screaming … plummeting from the sky towards the desert that loomed below, an empty wasteland of death. And over the top of all the noise came the chiming …

‘Shi!' Janil struggled into consciousness, slick with sweat, his breathing heavy.

Beside his bed, the terminal read 0303. Fourth shift still. The com-chiming grew louder, more insistent. It had to be his father. Nobody else would call at this time of day. Still groggy, Janil stabbed a finger at the interface pad beside his bed.

‘What?'

‘Janil.' Dernan Mann's voice was the same as always. Authoritative. Unapologetic. ‘Get into DGAP. I'll see you there.'

The line went dead. That was his father. No apology for calling at this hour, no explanation. Just crisp, ordered, scientific necessity.

Janil sighed. There was no point arguing. His father wouldn't have called him in without a logical, valid reason, and even if he did object, Dernan Mann would be genuinely surprised. In Dernan Mann's world, science and logic ruled over all else.

‘And I'm getting the same way,' he muttered as he rolled sluggishly out of his bed. It was a sobering thought. Only eighteen years old and already he felt … burnt out. Empty inside. It was the price of brilliance, he knew.

It took only minutes to throw on his work clothes and bolt down a protein bar. As he chewed on the paste, he stood and looked out the clearcrete window of his apartment, across the city. The view from here wasn't as good as from his father's dome. Janil had pulled every string he could to get a space allocation for one person and this was where he'd ended up – in a mixed-use dome with a recyc plant downstairs and decidedly shi water. This little two-roomer had one major thing going for it, though; down here he didn't have to look at his brother every waking minute.

The com chimed again.

‘Yeah?'

‘Why aren't you on your way?'

‘Father, what's—'

‘Later, Janil. Not over the com. Now, hurry.'

The line went dead again, and Janil's brow furrowed. The winds were certainly getting at his father this morning. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Dernan Mann so agitated.

His apartment was on the top level and as he stepped out of the lift foyer into the common, he was aware of the faint metallic tang from the recyc plant in the building behind.

From the towers a few lit windows indicated other early-risers, and from a couple of apartments he could hear the faint bustle of people getting started for the day. Steam mains in the walls hissed and shuddered as food units were brought online. Over near the hub a couple of shifties were listlessly running a cleaner across the ground. As he passed, they both stared at him.

‘Morning.' He nodded and was rewarded with blank stares. At least these two weren't so badly messed as some. Their faces seemed almost normal; one had just the faintest ridging of scar tissue rippling across his neck and right cheek, and the other a series of small, discoloured tumours dotted across his bare scalp. They both watched him pass with indolent indifference before returning their attention to their cleaner, which had moved on without them. Janil flicked his wristband across the allocation plate.

‘Mann. Port North Central. DGAP hub.'

The reader chimed and within a couple of minutes his maglift arrived, his name flashing on the display above the door. Once he was aboard, with a firm grip on the safety hold, the doors closed, the couplings disengaged, and with a magnetic hum the lift dropped into the system.

The newspanel on the ceiling cluttered the silence with babble from one of the citywebs.

‘Controller, engage user interface, Authorisation Mann, password, entropy.'

‘User interface engaged!

The user interface program used the same woman's voice as the lift controller: measured, easy on the ear and perfect in both tone and pitch. Janil had always liked it. He knew the voice was synthesised, most probably designed by programmers a thousand years ago to be clear and emotionless, but all the same he liked to imagine that somewhere in Port City lived a real woman with this voice. He wondered what she'd be like.

‘Controller, mute newspanel for duration of this allocation. End user interface.'

Obligingly, the newspanel faded into silence and Janil was left with only the hum of the resonators outside and his thoughts for company. Yet another advantage of being a Mann, he reflected. Most citizens had no idea that the user interface even existed, let alone access to it.

He wondered what could possibly have gotten his father so worked up. Janil was old enough to remember a time when mornings like this weren't so unusual in the Mann household. Once, his father used to rush into DGAP during the small hours of fourth shift three or four times a week.

Not for years, though. Not since Mum.

Janil himself had been in the program for five years now, and even in that short time it was impossible to escape the fact that things were winding up. The subjects were dropping like flies and their DNA was a mess, nowadays. A millennium of deprivation and radiation will do that to you, Janil thought.

If it hadn't been for the entropy scenario, Janil would have quit and looked for reallocation long ago. That and the fact that it wouldn't have done for the son of the head of research not to follow his father into the family field.

The eldest son, anyway.

Just the thought made Janil's eyes narrow slightly, but he tried to push the anger back down inside himself.

‘Stay cold. Stay clinical. Unharnessed emotion makes you unscientific.'

His father's words, coming from his mouth.

But still, he'd be willing to bet that, while he was magging across to DGAP, his little copygen brother was still tucked up fast asleep in bed, all worn out from another day of doing nothing.

Janil shook his head slightly. He'd never understood his brother. Sky, he'd never even really been told why his brother existed in the first place, just that his mother wanted another boy for some reason, and so when the other boys in his class talked about their sisters, all Janil could do was sit silently and hope nobody found out.

They did, of course. Kids always do.

Janil's got a brother! Janil's got a brother …

He could still hear them. Even now those childhood taunts came back. Luckily, he hadn't been in school all that long, so he'd only had to endure it for a few short years.

Port North Central. DGAP hub.

The lift surged upwards for a couple of seconds and then slowed. The foyer of the great scientific co-op was darkened and deserted at this time of the morning, the only light coming from the enormous, red-backlit sign which stretched across the grey plascrete wall behind the reception area:

DARKLANDS GENETIC ADAPTATION PROGRAM

Janil sighed, and his footsteps echoed around the empty space with its hard surfaces. The moment he stepped from the lift, his wristband chimed. There was a terminal behind reception and Janil logged in there.

‘Dad?'

‘Are you here yet?'

‘Just arrived. I'll be up in a moment.'

‘Don't. Meet me on the hangar deck.'

‘The…' Janil stopped, mystified. Their father hadn't been anywhere near the flyers in years. Not since their mother disappeared.

‘Don't say any more. Just meet me down there. Now.'

Shrugging, Janil made his way across to the internal lifts and scanned in, arriving downstairs before his father.

Most of the third and fourth shift patrols were already back, the flyers parked in two long rows, stretching away along the length of the vast hangar. Voices floated out from the ready room, where a couple of field agents were de-suiting, but otherwise the hangar was deserted. Sparse lighting from optic diffusers high in the roof gleamed off sleek black nosedomes, giving the flyers a vaguely sinister appearance. Down the far end, mired in gloom, crouched the few remaining intercit flyers, a relic of days long-gone, from when travel between the great skycities was still necessary.

It must have been incredible down here, Janil thought, when DGAP was big enough to warrant all these flyers – when they actually had enough personnel to put them all into the air at once. Nowadays they could manage a hundred, perhaps not even that. They'd got forty-three into the air the previous night, using a tip-off from a Subject as an excuse for a search and recover exercise, but of course there'd been nothing worthwhile out there. There never was.

Admittedly, the exercise had been a strange one, and interesting in its own way – they'd chased down a bunch of subjects right out near the western wall, where you barely ever saw anyone. They'd picked up their informant – strapped across the back of one of those animals they rode and babbling like a madman. He kept talking about a girl, but none of the other teams found anyone younger than about sixty out there. In the end they'd just tranqued him and dumped him back at the nearest town.

Janil sighed. Thinking too hard about the state of things in DGAP nowadays, or, indeed, the state of the skycities in general, was never a good idea. The focus of a thousand years of scientific observation – the longest running socio-cultural experiment ever conducted in the history of the human race – had been reduced to a couple of tribes squabbling in a desert.

‘Still, I guess that's how it all started, too,' he muttered.

‘What was that?' His father emerged from the lift and threw him a quizzical look.

‘Nothing, Father.' Janil shook his head slightly. ‘Just thinking aloud, that's all.'

‘Right. Well then.' His father glanced nervously towards the enormous, irised outer doors of the hangar.

‘What's going on?' Janil stared. Dernan Mann was actually smiling. Sure, it was a tiny, twitching smile, but definitely a smile, nonetheless.

‘The perimeter patrol called in forty-five minutes ago. They got her.'

‘Who?'

‘The girl.'

‘The …' Janil's face must have spoken for him, because his father nodded.

‘That's right. The girl who doesn't exist. She'll be here in' – he glanced at a timer mounted above the ready room door – ‘ten minutes.'

‘They actually found her out there?' Janil's voice was incredulous.

‘Near the western perimeter wall. Right where you were last night.'

‘Then why didn't we pick her up? We had forty-three flyers up there. We scanned every inch of that desert with IFR, UVA—'

‘I don't know, Janil,' his father interrupted. ‘But tonight they found her just standing there. Almost as though she was waiting for them, they said.'

‘Who's bringing her in?'

‘Flynn and Cutty.'

‘Shi! They're the two biggest mouths in the field division. They've probably woken half the city with the news already.'

‘They haven't. After their initial report they were ordered to shut down all coms and maintain complete silence until they returned. I've been monitoring ever since.'

‘So the webs have no idea …'

‘We don't think so. She's ours, Janil. All ours.'

‘Have you prepped the chamber?'

‘It's being done as we speak. I've got Clarke running tests on the radiation diffusers, making certain they're still up to spec. I haven't told him why, though.'

For a couple of moments the two stood facing each other. Janil's head reeled. He understood his father's excitement now. Understood the need for secrecy, too. It was incredible. Immense. Possibly the biggest thing to happen in DGAP in three hundred years, certainly in the few short years he'd been with the agency.

‘Here they come.'

On the far wall of the hangar one of the giant portals was slowly winding open. As it slid back, a warm, dusty breeze slipped into the hangar. Janil sniffed.

‘I hate that smell. Outside air always tastes so … old.'

‘That's because it is.'

He was surprised to see how light it was, already. The sun was clearly close to the low horizon, because out beyond the domes and spires the sky glowed a bloody crimson.

‘They're cutting it close,' he commented.

‘We'll forgive them, this once. They hadn't expected to be doing a recovery. We should suit up.'

‘Is that necessary?'

‘Absolutely. Level one quarantine for this one. Let's face it, she'll be our last chance, so I don't want to risk either us or her.'

Janil followed his father over to the ready room, where two field agents were sitting on the benches, talking and relaxing after their long night. Both leapt to their feet, startled to find the head of research division there, of all places.