The Mandel Files (144 page)

“Julia,” Greg called.

Julia’s face vanished from the largest flatscreen, replaced by a view of the Colonel Maitland’s landing pad with the gutted wreck of the Pegasus still smoking. Charlotte gasped.

“That’s the plane we came in,” Greg said. “There were four people on board when it was hit by the tekmercs. That’s your alternative. Now will you please come with us.”

“I’m not leaving Fabian. Not if tekmercs are on their way here.”

Fabian looked up at her with complete adoration. Greg realized they weren’t going to be separated. And he had promised Jason Whitehurst exactly that. Bloody wonderful.

“We’re not asking you to leave him, Charlotte,” Julia said gently. “One moment.”

There was a burst of static.

Jason Whitehurst’s voice came out of the music deck speakers. “Fabian?”

“Yes, Father?”

Greg’s cybofax bleeped. He looked down at it.

“You stay with Charlotte and Mr Mandel,” Jason Whitehurst said. “It’ll be a lot safer for you. These damn tekmercs are all over the old Colonel. Bloody trigger happy brutes, they are. I’ll catch up with you later, I must see the crew is all right first, noblesse oblige, and all that. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Father.”

Greg showed the cybofax to Suzi. Her face remained impassive as she read the screen’s message.

“Splendid chap; bit of an adventure for you. Charlotte, my dear girl, what can one say? I’m most dreadfully sorry about all this trouble. Julia will explain later. You take care of Fabian in the mean time for me, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jolly good.”

Greg pulled a first aid box off the wall, and found a local anaesthetic infuser. Charlotte didn’t resist when he took her hand. He pressed the infuser tube to her wrist.

She gave a tremulous little sigh as the anaesthetic took effect.

“Careful you don’t knock the hand against anything,” he warned her.

She nodded meekly.

Suzi was wiping Fabian’s chin with a disinfectant tissue.

“OK,” Greg said. “Let’s move. Julia, which way?”

“Turn right outside, down to the hull, then head up towards the prow. I’ve loaded your route.”

He glanced at the cybofax, memorizing the Colonel Maitland’s blueprint with its superimposed red line.

It was cool outside the MHD chamber. The engineering bay heat exchangers constantly circulated the air in the gap between the hull and the gasbags, preventing the helium from becoming superheated and losing lift capacity. Greg thought it smelt vaguely of chlorine. It left an unpleasant tang at the back of his throat.

He led them along the walkway, the opposite direction to the way he and Suzi had come. Charlotte and Fabian followed him, holding hands; Suzi brought up the rear. The worst of his neurohormone hangover was lifting, but he wouldn’t be able to use the gland again today, not after two psi effusions like that.

“Greg, a little faster, please,” Julia said out of his cybofax. There was an edge in her voice.

“Right.” He began to step out.

A rip gun was fired behind them, the sound of its shot rumbling round the engineering bay. It was the signal for a whole barrage to begin.

“What’s that?” Charlotte asked, raising her voice above the clamour.

“Rip guns.”

“Crikey,” said Fabian, he squinted at Greg with his one good eye. “You mean a neutral-beam weapon?”

“No messing.”

They reached the hull. A silent rank of drones was drawn up beside the transverse frame ladder. Greg didn’t have time to question their presence. He turned on to the walkway that led towards the prow, sandwiched between the gasbag and the solar cell envelope. It curved away ahead of him, fading to grey.

The rip guns had stopped firing.

“Get going,” Julia said. The drones began to move out on to the engineering bay girders.

Fabian watched them go curiously. “Do you have hotrods working for Event Horizon?” he asked.

“One or two,” Julia answered.

“Fabian, not now,” Charlotte said.

“Sorry.”

The walkway made Greg think of the eidolonic loop he’d left Chad in. The engineering bay had disappeared from sight behind, and more walkway kept unfolding in front, seemingly endless. They were moving at a jog now. Charlotte’s panting was loud in his ears. His own breathing wasn’t too good either.

There were five rip-gun shots fired in rapid succession. The sound barely audible.

“Last of the drones gone,” Julia said. The cybofax wafer was in his top pocket again, banging on his chest. “The three tekmercs are covering all the options. One has gone down the transverse frame ladder, another is climbing up.”

“And the third’s coming after us,” Suzi finished.

“Right,” said Julia.

“Run faster?” Greg asked.

“He’ll still be able to catch you. You’re only a hundred and eighty metres ahead of him.”

“The next transverse ladder?”

“No, you’d be sitting ducks on that.”

“Stand and fight. The Tokarev might penetrate the armour.”

“No,” Julia said. “I’ve got your escape route mapped out. Keep going, twenty metres. Stop by the next doughnut gasbag.”

The only way Greg found it was because of the deep concave fold in the plastic where the two bags pressed together. He came to a halt, breathing hard. Charlotte stopped behind him, her face drained.

“Are you all right?” she asked Fabian.

The boy flipped some of his ragged hair off his face. “Yes.” They still hadn’t let go of each other’s hands.

“What now?” Greg asked. He kept his nerves alert for the sound of the tekmerc, wondering if he should order another gland secretion after all.

“Start hyperventilating,” Julia said.

“What’s this bollocks, you hustle us along here for exercise classes?” Suzi snapped. “Have you glitched?” She was the only one who wasn’t breathing heavily.

“No, listen,” Julia said. “I want Greg to slice open the doughnut gasbag with his Tokarev. Then you hold your breath, and slide down the inside. You will stop right above the keel walkway. Greg cuts the plastic again, and you drop out.,

Suzi gave Greg an imploring look. “If both of us fire at once, we can snuff that tekmerc.”

Greg wasn’t so sure. Suzi’s idea was all down to chance. Julia’s had logic behind it. Machine logic, admittedly. And of course, she didn’t have to do it herself.

“The tekmerc can just follow us down the doughnut,” he said.

“No,” Julia said. “It’ll tear like paper under the weight of the armour. He’d fall straight out of the airship.”

“All right, we’ll try it.”

“Shit,” Suzi said. “Fluid.”

Greg looked at Charlotte and Fabian. “Do you two understand?”

They both nodded, both looked scared.

“Whatever you do, don’t breathe in while you’re inside the doughnut,” Julia said. “Helium isn’t toxic, but there’s no oxygen. You’ll asphyxiate.”

Greg got his breathing back under control, and drew the Tokarev. “Everybody ready?”

“Do it,” Suzi said.

He aimed at a point level with his own head. “Breathe in now, and follow me straight away.” He hoped to hell the two kids would do as they were told, Suzi would have trouble bullying both of them. Or maybe not.

The vivid red beam pierced the plastic, and Greg swung it down to the walkway, opening up a two-metre slit. With the Tokarev held in his right hand, he sat on the walkway grid, pushing his feet into the open gash. The blackness inside the doughnut was impenetrable, it almost seemed to slop out on to the walkway. He ducked his head under the hand rail, and pushed off.

The Messerschmitt exploded without warning. Julia had to replay the external camera memories to understand the sequence of events.

Two Typhoon air-superiority fighters arrowed in from the north, silver-grey needles with wings retracted, using the airship as a radar shield. Not that the Messerschmitt would have had many options even if it had detected them, not when they travelled at Mach eleven. One went over the Colonel Maitland, the second went under. Three Kinetic Energy Kill missiles slammed into the Messerschmitt at Mach seventeen. Then the fighters were gone.

A fireball enveloped the Messerschmitt, billowing out. It was slapped by the supersonic backwash from the two fighters; invisible hands compressing it back into a lenticular shape. Chunks of flaming wreckage spewed out from the ragged edges, spinning through the air, arching down towards the distant ocean.

The Colonel Maitland was shaken violently by the Typhoons’ passage. Julia monitored the buffeting they inflicted on the already damaged fuselage framework. Stress sensors reported a dangerous amount of weakening in the midsection.

She sounded the evacuation alarm before the bridge crew had a chance to evaluate the situation; klaxons blaring out all through the airship. The hatches on the survival pods popped open.

The Messerschmitt’s halo of ionized flame contracted, wrapping itself around the broken fuselage. The plane rolled lazily, then began the long fall towards the water.

External camera, starboard fuselage. Two Event Horizon transports were decelerating fast; big XCV-77 Titan stealth hypersonics with a cranked delta planform. They were virtually standing on their tails to aerobrake, underbellies glowing cerise; airflow vortices created spiral vapour trails that streamed off each wingtip, as if they were stretching out giant white springs behind them.

With the jamming blanket lifted, Julia opened a communication link to the lead Titan. Her living self was plugged into the transport plane’s sensors, anxious for information. She compiled a summary of events since the Messerschmitt’s attack, and squirted it over.

Get Greg and company back into the gondola, her living self said, I’ll brief the crash team to lift them.

OK.

Tekmerc squad inter-suit radio communication.

Tekmerc eight, female: “Oh, Jesus wept. The deal’s been burnt. Event Horizon planes, big buggers.”

Leol Reiger: “Ian, Keith, Danny, get back to the gondola. Move!”

Tekmerc five: “Coming, Leol.”

Julia: “Last chance, Leol Reiger. Put down your weapons, deactivate your armour. It’s all over.”

Leol Reiger: “Screw you. Everybody, Charlotte Fielder is to be snuffed. If you see her, kill her. How do you like that, rich bitch? You tell your people to stand off, I’ll let her live.”

Julia: “No deal.”

External cameras, overview. Both Titans were slowly circling the Colonel Maitland like prowling wolves, disgorging the security crash team from their open loading ramps. The hovering armour-suited figures formed an encircling necklace around the airship, electronic senses sweeping it for signs of tekmerc activity. When their deployment manoeuvre was complete, they began to close on the gondola.

Survival pods were dropping out of the bottom of the gondola, small white spheres with strobes flashing urgently. Two hundred metres below the airship their red and white striped parachutes bloomed, lowering them gently towards the ocean.

A rip-gun bolt, fired from inside the gondola, speared one of the approaching armour suits. The security hardliner disappeared in a plume of blue-white flame. Another bolt stabbed out.

The crash team let off a fusillade of plasma bolts at the gondola window where the rip-gun bolts had come from.

Internal camera, gondola lower-deck cabin. Leol Reiger was running from the bedroom, barging through the open doorway out into the central corridor. Plasma bolts smashed into the cabin behind him, igniting the furniture and fittings. An inferno was raging inside within seconds.

The armour suit’s speaker emitted a demented peal of laughter as Reiger ran towards the stern.

Suzi wanted to scream. She was in freefall, hurtling through black eternity. The plastic surface of the doughnut gasbag had disappeared as soon as she jumped, the fissure of weak light from the gash drying up almost at once. There was nothing she could orientate on, no reference point. Time seemed to be expanding. It was like being plunged into sensory deprivation. Leol Reiger would be laughing his flicking head off if he could see her now, all panicky like this.

Standing and fighting would have made a fucking site more sense than this. They could have shot the walkway out from under the tekmerc, no need to penetrate the muscle armour, just flush him out of the airship. Too late now. And what the hell did some warped ‘ware package know about tactics anyway?

A thunderclap penetrated the closed universe of the doughnut gasbag. The sound rumbled around her, a drawn out tortured roar. Explosion. Then came the multiple sonic booms, the grating sound of the airship’s fuselage bending and flexing. Definitely some snaps of breaking frames. Christ!

Something flicked up her back. She began to spin. Then she was skittering and sliding down the curving plastic wall of the gasbag, totally out of control. Her injured knee twisted viciously as she reeled round, nearly making her cry out loud. It was all she could do to keep her mouth clamped shut.

There was an electric flare of deep vermilion light ahead of her. The scene it uncovered was weird, two-tone, red and black. A huge curved cylindrical cavern, slick walls printed with a black hexagonal web pattern, palpitating softly. Jonah must have seen something like this, she thought. She’d always liked that story back in the Trinities; their preacher, Goldfinch, could make it sound real somehow when he was delivering his sermons.

Fabian Whitehurst was visible ten metres in front of her, sliding down the bottom of the doughnut’s curve, jouncing about madly. She stretched her arms out, trying to slow her speed. The light went out.

She could still hear the fuselage protesting loudly.

The angle of the gasbag’s slope began to shallow out, reducing her speed. There was a stark slice of hoary light shining out of the floor fifteen metres away. She saw Fabian on all fours, scrabbling towards it. He vanished abruptly, as though he’d been sucked down.

Suzi came to a halt about three metres from the cut, and started crawling towards it. She could hear her heart pumping fast, the need to take a breath rising. Her knee was alive with stabs of pain as it pressed into the plastic.

She reached the cut, and grasped the melted edge with her hands, pulling her body through and down. A half-somersault and she was standing on the walkway.