Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (15 page)

Finally, shivers of that other darkness manifested across the road, somewhere close to one of the black lion statues.

I have to do this
.

She wanted to pee, but that was impossible. She wanted her hands to stop shaking, and that was not happening either. Still she walked across the road, reached the steps – slowly, slowly in the blackout with only a hint of moon – down to the level of the square proper. The handbag clasp opened with an unexpected snap.

A palsy took over her entire body.

‘—that?’ a voice muttered.

A vague sense of two men searching the darkened square.

Over there
.

The revolver felt so massive. She crouched down, placed her handbag on the flagstones, and rose with both hands trying to keep the Webley aimed.

A faint hint of nine awful notes on the air.

I’ve got you both
.

But the barrel was shaking – small deflections, big trajectory changes, so forth – which meant she had to get closer. Trying to be soundless, she advanced.

‘There!’ yelled one of her targets.

‘I see—’

Then metallic whistles sounded on all sides, torch beams swung through the air, and a leather-gloved hand reached over Gavriela’s shoulder and fastened on the revolver, while her insides dissolved in the acid of fear, reality swirling around her.

‘I’ll take that, old girl. You must be freezing.’

Rupert Forrester smiled at her, his breath steaming white by torchlight. Twenty policemen or more were converging on the enemy: two strangers, who dropped their guns and put up their hands even before the command.

‘Bloody risky night to be a brass monkey,’ Rupert added. ‘So a nice hot cup of tea would be in order, don’t you think?’

The concept of a single amateur outguessing the authorities to apprehend a criminal, so facile, ground away at Roger’s confidence. What he had going for him was his ability to perceive some resonance –
something
– from Helsen; but it was nothing he could replicate for others to use, or use himself at long distance. Barbour was an entire sky-city, and he could wander it for years and still not lay eyes on any given inhabitant.

Especially if she was avoiding him.

From the authorities’ viewpoint, their target’s appearance was unknown, likewise all the markers – such as DNA traces or neural clique configurations – normally used for suspect identification. At least, if Roger had understood Tannier and Bendelhamer correctly, that was why Helsen had stolen the autodoc: to give herself a new identity, all the way down to her molecules.

Bitch
.

And the man who had been with her on Fulgor – were there two of them here, looking to replicate the Fulgor Catastrophe on Molsin? Roger walked through the halls and galleries of Barbour at random, trying to notice everything while despairing of the probabilities, with not even a halfway decent strategy for searching.

What is she after?

Assume Helsen’s objective was to create a second Anomaly, or an extension of the first. (And that
was
an assumption: perhaps she planned to live out her days in hiding, her life’s goal accomplished.) On Fulgor, the genesis had been a rogue Luculenta attacking her peers in Skein. On Molsin, neither concept – Luculenti or Skein – applied. Perhaps Tannier’s people had some notion of a local equivalent, some route by which a nascent Anomaly might attack. They must be smart enough, and have resources whose strength he could not gauge; but they would have no reason to share their thoughts with him.

Hence the amateur, all alone.

At an eatery, while he drank daistral, he observed a teacher accompanying fifteen pupils, all young, as they worked a holodisplay above the table they had been eating at.

‘There’s our forecast,’ she said, ‘and Jacqui, can you see the numbers?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘So if you play with them, just a little, what happens?’

The forecast views changed in real time with the girl’s manipulations.

‘If we change the numbers by a small amount,’ said the teacher, ‘does the forecast change very much?’

Shakes of young heads all around the table.

They look really bright
.

Clearly the teacher was going to show them another region where altering parameters by a tiny amount shifted the prediction enormously. In a sky-city in Molsin’s streaming, complex atmospheric system, its flows made visible by predominant orange clouds, this was an everyday example to introduce chaos, the first step in learning about non-linearity and complexity.

In the holo, an image of what might have been Barbour floated amid cloud-banks, while a pulse of tiny dots streamed out from its aft end.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to the teacher. ‘Are those things just markers in the display? Or are they real?’

‘Quickbug flyers,’ the teacher said. ‘Children, I think we have an offworld visitor. What do we say?’

‘Welcome to Barbour, mister,’ they chanted.

‘Would you like to talk to us,’ asked the teacher, ‘about where you—?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.’ Roger waved at the children. ‘You guys are terrific.’

He jogged out of the eatery, flushed with the probability of behaving like an idiot, but trusting himself deep down. On this level, he had been the length of the city, from the bow-end of Vertebral Longway to the rear. He had not liked the atmosphere in the aft sections.

Bad vibes
.

Subliminal hints that he had failed to process consciously? Perhaps the people really had been less friendly there, the decor and underlying architecture less pleasing; or perhaps some other perceptual trace had been attenuated beyond his capacity to detect.

Tannier’s people would know about the flyers. But if Helsen could avoid security checks, she might reach another sky-city, and maybe another after that. If this privacy culture was global, the further she went, the deeper she could hide.

Two median strips offered fast-flow transport. Using the public service interfaces displayed above his tu-ring, Roger caused a vortex to form around his feet; then the vortex whirled around his ankles, and twisted him into the main laminar flow.

He sped along Vertebral Longway, sure he had missed another opportunity.

If there was security, Roger could not see it, unless it was the two scarlet-uniformed helpers who chatted with people, younger folk in particular, as they prepared to fly outside. That preparation consisted of sitting on an extruded block of orange quickglass – here in this chamber, everything bore the hue of old marmalade – while a thin bubble formed then thickened; and finally the bubble slid across the deck and into the solid hull.

Through yellow-tinted view windows, you could see the bubbles pop out into the sky, now as teardrop-shapes with stubby wings, all of orange quickglass.

‘Are they gliders?’ asked Roger.

One of the assistants frowned – clearly a blunt question was impolite – but the other answered: ‘Mostly gliders, with arterial fuel for a full-burst emergency return if the winds increase.’

Even more than on Fulgor, quickglass was filled with intricate structures and systems, threaded through the malleable substrate.

She’s out there
.

There were dozens of these quickbug flyers, maybe hundreds dipping in and out of cloud banks: an entire flock trailing the city. At some point, Helsen had slipped out in a flyer to join them, perhaps from some lower level where no one would expect a quickbug to form.

He could not hear the music, not even a fragment; nor could he see darkness twisting through impossible geometric transformations; yet certainty was crystallizing.

‘I’d like to take a flight, please.’

‘Certainly, sir. The orientation and flightware tutorial takes several—’

‘I really need to get out there now.’

‘It’s not just the matter of queue-jumping, sir. Your safety is important to us.’

‘I … Forgive me. Sorry.’

‘That’s quite all right, sir.’

He shrugged at the waiting people as he left. Once outside, he projected the public interfaces from his tu-ring as before; then he released his burrowers and introspectors, code-forms evolved to infiltrate and unravel, passed into the unsuspecting service operations disguised as innocuous parameters. Besides his secret in Ascension Annexe, this was the other thing he had not mentioned to anyone in Labyrinth, or anywhere else: Dad had bequeathed a copy of all his subversion ware, every covert utility he owned, dumped in a zipblip from tu-ring to tu-ring, father to son.

It was a simple hack of a public service to descend through the deck to the level below, and pass through the wall into a storage bay half-filled with stacks of penrose containers. Creating the quickbug took another two minutes, due to the amount of security-breaking computation required.

Then he was sitting inside a hollow sphere sliding towards the metres-thick hull.

Let’s hope I got this bit right
.

The hollow passed inside solid quickglass. Then the front cleared. Vertigo startled Roger: there was only thin quickglass between him and the long drop to the cloud-banks below. Being a passenger in a mu-space ship had not prepared him for this.

Behind him, the rear of his quickbug looked darker and more solid: the tail of the teardrop. As the wings extruded on either side, he forced himself to reinterpret his fear as fight preparation, to be grateful for adrenaline that would power him through the hunt.

The quickbug flyer launched.

And fell away from the city.

By the second hour, he was enjoying himself. Dipping in and out of clouds, floating past other flyers – waggling his wings to say hello, all other comms disabled – and the simple process of controlling the glide-configuration with occasional pulses from the drive arteries: it absorbed all his concentration, yet his feeling of freedom bordered on elation. Still with no sign of Helsen, though occasionally he had felt something close by, like sensing thunder before it occurred.

There
.

And she was on him.

The other flyer was huge in comparison, shearing overhead, tendrils smashing into his quickglass bubble –
tendrils!
– because it was configured for attack. There were two figures inside, he was almost sure of it, as the big flyer banked left and down, and he twisted his own quickbug’s wings to follow.

Diving now.

They were inside intermittent cloud, all the other flyers lost from sight, and not by accident: that bitch Helsen had set an ambush, and attacked but failed to kill him. He let loose the drive power, accelerating downwards, everything beginning to shake, vision blurring as his eyeballs vibrated.

I’ll take you down with me if I have to
.

There was someone waiting for him in Ascension Annexe but Helsen was here and now and she had killed everyone on Fulgor including his parents and there was no way she could be allowed to live. The sound inside the quickbug was rising and he wondered if the flyer could shake itself apart but that did not matter because his target was –
there, left
– and then he was diving even faster: full power, designed for emergency climb, driving him down.

She pulled aside at the last moment, once more whipping her flyer’s tendrils against his hull.

Shit shit shit
.

His quickbug flyer was finding it hard to respond, shaking as he tried to pull it level, sudden loss of vision all around as cloud swallowed his quickbug; and then a high, splintering sound cut through the roar, a second before he saw the cause.

The quickglass was cracking.

It’s not supposed to do that
.

He spread the wings further, wondering what he had done wrong.

Venom in the tendrils
.

Helsen was smarter than he was, that was all.

‘Bitch bitch bitch.’

The cockpit was opaque, webbed with cracks, about to fail.

Shit. No
.

But the rear of the teardrop remained intact, or seemed to, and there were seconds left before the cockpit bubble exploded but Dad’s subversion ware had been the best and he trusted to it now.

‘I’m not going to die, you bitch.’

A hollow opening appeared inside the teardrop tail.

‘Not before you.’

He crawled inside.

Close up
.

The command was executing, the gap closing to a hand’s width, when the world disappeared in a massive percussive bang.

Drifting, his sleep so peaceful. Mum and Dad were with him, and all was warm with the soft wind so distant. Wonderful to curl up in here for ever.

A bump.

Go away
.

Voices, and then the hands upon him.

‘—deprivation, and acid in the lungs.’

Shaking. Tipping him.