RETURN TO THE FRACTURED PLANET

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RETURN TO THE

FRACTURED PLANET

Dave Stone

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by

NA

an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd

Thames Wharf Studios

Rainville Road

London W6 9HT

Copyright © Dave Stone 1999

The right of Dave Stone to be identified as the Author of this Work has

been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

Bernice Summerfield was originally created by Paul Cornell

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 0 426 20534 0

Cover illustration by Fred Gambino

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade

or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher‟s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar condition,

including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTEXTUAL NOTES:

In reconstructing this text we have taken, so far as is

possible, our model from the data file currently in general

circulation as The Mary-Sue Extrusion, the most complete

document on record by the same hand - and it is,

unquestionably, despite certain inconsistencies, the same

hand. That is, we have attempted to collate the material

extant into the form of a novel, integrating such additional,

supplementary and bridging material as seems related and,

indeed, necessary. In this, we have erred on the side of

caution and literary conservatism: we make no great stylistic

claims, the intention merely being to produce a work as self-

contained and comprehensible as possible - presenting the

information in what our unnamed writer, in The Mary-Sue,

terms „an easily assimilable lump‟.

The material extant primarily consists of two separate but

related narratives, each dealing with a different series of

events, both of them, so far as can be ascertained, written at

around

the

same

time,

though

under

different

circumstances. The first, more circumstantial and longer,

narrative appears to have been based upon material written,

if not under duress, then at least not of the author‟s active

will, though whether under a process of debriefing or what

might be termed „interrogation-and-confession‟ it is not

possible to tell internally.

The second, shorter, narrative appears to have been based

on reports written some years before. Although separated,

subsequently, for many years, it seems to have been

rewritten with the first in mind, containing nascent linkages

between the two other than the immediately and contextually

obvious. To the extent that we have tampered with these

linkages, we have restricted ourselves to merely reinforcing

them as and when it seems most obvious to do so. Our most

audacious step in this area, some might think, is in our

decision to interleave the narratives, but we are of the firm

opinion that this goes some way to repairing the severance

between the two, and further believe that this is what the

author would have done himself, had circumstances allowed.

Quite what these circumstances were, at this late date, it is

impossible to tell with any great certainty. The author quite

obviously survived the events of these accounts to write

them, but no further records of him subsequently appear.

Given the length of time involved, and the upheavals in the

wider galactic sense, and his anonymous and somewhat

secretive nature in the first place, it is impossible to draw

conclusions either way. If he‟s still alive he could be any-

where, quite frankly. We mean, he could even be putting on

an incredibly poncy voice and dictating the preface to a

half-arsed, knock-off and entirely bog-standard compilation

of old toss in a quick attempt to cash in on the unexpected

popularity of The Mary-Sue...

We are greatly indebted to the estate of Ms Elanore Vita

Hydrant Summerfield-Kane for permission to quote from the

diaries of her illustrious ancestor. While being tolerably well

known in their own right (and, incidentally, quite firmly

within the public domain), these excerpts provide vital

information of which our author was not aware, but without

which the events of the text would not make any reasonable

kind of comprehensible sense.

Certain inconsistencies, lapses and statements at variance

with established historical, scientific and biological facts

remain. We have decided to leave them so, on the basis that

we are concerned with the author‟s understanding and

interpretation of events, and that the mistakes one makes

say more about one, on any number of levels, than the

correctitudes.

- The Compilers

QUOTATION

[Found among the original material and marked ‘Use This’.]

“In science - in fact, in most things - it is usually best to

begin at the beginning. In some things, of course, it‟s better to

begin at the other end. For instance, if you wanted to paint a

dog green, it might be best to begin with the tail, as it doesn‟t

bite at that end. And so -”

“May I help oo?” Bruno interrupted.

“Help me to what?” said the puzzled Professor, looking

up for a moment, but keeping his finger on the book he

was reading from, so as not to lose his place.

“To paint a dog green!” cried Bruno. “Oo can begin wiz

its mouf, and I‟ll -”

“No, no!” said the Professor. “We haven‟t got to the

Experiments yet. And so,” returning to his notebook, “I‟ll

give you the Axioms of Science. After that I shall exhibit

some Specimens. Then I shall explain a Process or two.

And then I shall conclude with a few Experiments. An

Axiom, you know, is a thing that you accept without

contradiction. For instance, if I were to say „Here we are!‟,

that would be accepted without any contradiction, and it‟s

a nice sort of remark to begin a conversation with. So it

would be an Axiom. Or again, supposing I were to say,

„Here we are not!‟, that would be -”

“- a fib!” cried Bruno.

“Oh, Bruno!” said Sylvie in a warning whisper. “Of

course it would be an Axiom, if the Professor said it!”

“- that would be accepted, if people were civil,” continued

the Professor; “so it would be another Axiom!”

“It might be an Axeldum,” Bruno said: “but it wouldn‟t

be true.”

“Ignorance of Axioms,” the Lecturer continued, “is a

great drawback in life. It wastes so much time to have to

say them over and over again. For instance, take the

Axiom, ‘Nothing is greater than itself’; that is, ‘Nothing can

contain itself.’ How often do you hear people say, „He was

so excited he was unable to contain himself.‟ Why of course

he was unable! The excitement had nothing to do with it!”

“I say, look here, you know!” said the Emperor, who was

getting a little restless. “How many Axioms are you going

to give us? At this rate, we sha‟n‟t get to the Experiments till

to-morrow-week!”

“Oh, sooner than that, I assure you!” the Professor

replied, looking up in alarm. “There are only,” (he

referred to his notes again) “only two more, that are really

necessary.”

“Read „em out and get on to the Specimens,” grumbled

the Emperor.

“The First Axiom,” the Professor read out in a great

hurry, “consists of these words, ‘Whatever is, is.’ And the

Second consists of these words, ‘Whatever isn’t, isn’t’ We will

now go on to the Specimens. The first tray contains Crystals

and other Things.” He drew it towards him, and again

referred to his notebook. “Some of the labels - owing to

insufficient adhesion -” Here he stopped again, and care-

fully examined the page with his eye-glass. “I ca‟n‟t read

the rest of the sentence,” he said at last, “but it means that

the labels have come loose, and the Things have got

mixed ..

- Extract from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll

BACKGROUND ZERO (SUPPLEMENTARY)

I opened my eyes.

That was the first surprise - the fact that I had eyes

to open. The second surprise was how utterly well I

felt. I mean, I don‟t mean I felt well after being some

kind of disembodied and prototypical Al construct - if I

could believe the Voice and it hadn‟t all been just some

incredibly complicated interrogation technique. I mean

that I had never felt this sense of physical strength and

lack of pain in my life - and certainly not for the years of

chronic malnutrition, lice and hard knocks of the

Birmingham EMG Zone.

I was flat on my back, lying on something almost

impossibly smooth-feeling and soft, in a cool white

room. The air tasted weird, until I realized that it just

tasted fresh. Somewhere I heard the distant sound of air

conditioners.

A face loomed over me. Female, quite possibly the

most beautiful face - and certainly the most healthy-

looking - I‟d ever seen. There was a vague sense of

disorientation about it, though - look, given the tenor of

my times, I was slightly less of what used to be called

racist than otherwise, and the self-enclosed, blockaded

life within the city meant that what in my day was called

mixed race, and in these days is called hybridity, wasn‟t

much of an issue. But even so, the face of the woman just

seemed wrong. Little things happening at the edges of

her eyes and mouth, a skin tone that had a slightly

greenish tinge - it wasn‟t that she was some saurian

monster with scales and claws or anything. She just

seemed somehow fundamentally wrong.

Panic reflex cut in. I tried to lurch away, found that my

forearms and shins were restrained - and then I saw

just what, precisely, these forearm-and-shin-restraining

restraints were restraining. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!‟

„Listen!‟ the rather nice but fundamentally wrong woman

cried as I struggled in vain against the straps. „Just listen,

please! We‟re here to help you through this. Please, try to

be still and I‟ll try to explain...‟

- Extract from The Mary-Sue Extrusion

CHAPTER 1

„The Habitats of the Proximan Chain are a kind of three-

way cross between the various ideas of space stations,

colonies and planetary settlements. That is, the physical

space they occupy is spread out over those locations,

linked together by a series of mass-transit pads, taking you

from one to another instantly, so that the end result is that

of a single and coherent environment.

„“Coherent”, though, is probably not the right word. If

you‟re one of those who divide environments into low- or

hi-tech, then the Proximan Chain takes the “high” to

the extreme. It‟s a kind of tacitly agreed playground for

the greyer areas of the Big Boys involved in anything

from body swap, mind sculpting, Al-envelope pushing,

tailored-pharmaceutical pushing, weaponry development

and anything else with an easily assimilable acronym or

hyphen you can name.

„I love it, frankly, in the same way I love my arms or

eyes - it‟s my natural environment, simple as that. The

Word on the Street might limp around in other places, but

here, in the Proximan Chain, you can‟t make a move

without everybody knowing instantly - if they happen to

feel like pulling it out of the informational chaos of what

everybody else is doing as well - and you know that, deep

inside, deep in your guts and your implants.

„The feeling of hooking yourself in and moving through

is impossible to describe to those who don‟t know it, any

more than a medieval peasant could describe the minutiae

of the experience of walking through a tithe plot and being

aware of every single plant in it, knowing that each was

special and had any number of uses and aspects. It would

take hours to list the mere specifics of a single minute. The

Proximan chain is, quite simply, home…‟

I wrote that a while back in some other thing, and every

word is true. The thing I neglected to mention was that

having a home, spiritual or otherwise, can be incredibly

dangerous. You invest things in it on any number of levels,

put out these invisible roots that hook you into vast

systems of association, without ever quite knowing that

you‟re doing it.

Stay in the same place for too long and you become

sedentary, a sitting target. People start to get to know your

name. And where you live.

The gravmetics caught me as I hit my floor. I stuck out a

hand, snagged a couple of fingers round the safety bar and

hauled myself out of the tube, breathing slow and easy, like

my subconscious hadn‟t suddenly noticed I‟d been hanging

halfway down a two-kilometre shaft and had started to panic.

The warren in which I was currently living was cut into the

living rock of one of the planetary Habitats, operated under

something like Earth-normal gravity, and I had to force firmly

out of my mind images of what would happen if the power

cut out. The fact that the drop tube‟s field was solid-state

didn‟t do much for a back of the mind that still thought

power, as such, came from spluttering gasoline or methane

generators which worked for less than minutes on the trot if

they could be coaxed into working at all.

This was a relatively low-rent Habitat, without the

constantly live-labour interior-redecorated spaces of the

richer areas, or the mood-mimetic fixtures of the more

bourgeois, which meant that things could tend to change a

little when your back was turned. The walls of the

communal access tunnel were of the same communal-

architecture design as I‟d left them - a sort of poncy quasi-

low-rent-bohemian splattering of rag and flockwork. Bit of a

pity, really, since I really hate poncy ragwork and flock.

A squeaky was hanging outside my door on its flotation

sacs - a kind of miniature, triocular blimp, bristling with

manipulatory attachments and appendages that seemed

part organic, part cybernetic. Squeakies were originally

force-evolved in some design lab or other, but have since

become so prevalent that they‟ve evolved on their own,

and they serve the inconspicuously useful function of

benign bacteria but on the macroscopic scale. This one

shrittered at me from an octopus-like beak, enquiring as to

whether I‟d like my chambers set to rights in return for

any dust particles, grease deposits or inextricably lodged

dead pararats it might find.

„Piss off out of it,‟ I told it. What with one thing and another

I wasn‟t in a cheery mood. A few days ago, Kara and I had

had one of those arguments that start over nothing in

particular and escalate into that mutual, cold, back-turning

spite that hurts more than any amount of shouting for the

simple reason that it hurts you both as much. Since then she

hadn‟t even answered, far less returned my calls.

I‟d see her again, of course, and we‟d talk, and touch, and

carry on as though nothing had happened - but for the

moment I was going through that stage of miserably

replaying what we‟d said, coming up with pithy little things I

should have said, and just generally plotting how I could pay

her back in horrible and nasty ways. And, while squeakies

and their ilk are pretty much harmless, their bumbling and

wibbling around, the little cries of glee as they find a

particularly tasty bit of refuse and the happy sound of high-

speed chomping can get incredibly irritating.

Besides... ubiquitous, inconspicuous, useful little creatures

who wander in and out of people‟s homes present a, shall we

say, interesting prospect for certain forces on both sides of the

conflict. I can‟t use the word law, of course, on account of

how the Proximan Chain hasn‟t got one. We had one once,

apparently, but the wheels fell off.

The upshot of all this is that, if you let a squeaky in, then

you‟d better be damned well ready to run some extensive

diagnostics for implants and, nine times out of ten, you

might as well save the time and effort by grabbing a mop and

doing the floor yourself. The squeaky looked at me with three

soulful little eye-analogues, realized eventually that I really

wasn‟t having any, gave a little snort calculated to show

precisely what it thought of a man who lived worse than a

Piglet Person, turned and sculled off down the tunnel. I kept

half an eye on it until it had rounded the comer, then

stepped towards my door.

Absolutely nothing happened - and this was where I started

to worry.

Ordinarily, I carry an extensively customized package of

cyberbiologics wrapped around my left forearm. I call it Box.

When I had decided to stick around in the Chain for a while,

though, I had converted it into a static installation, linked to

the perfectly ordinary, cellular comms unit that took its

place. On the plus side, this had allowed me to go to serious

town with the integrated processing power, but on the minus

it meant a breaking of absolutely direct contact - something, I

was starting now to realize, that might have been a mistake.

Approaching the door should have triggered a signal from

Box to the comms unit - a happy little chime rendition of

„Grandad‟s Flannelette Shirt‟, and the equivalent of those

hoods you see in the holomovies, fiddling with their tie knots

for a hidden camera as a signal that nobody has a gun to

their backs. The lack of this meant that Box was off line -

and that was what worried me so. I‟m not a complete idiot:

sensors, backups and security fail-safes were in place.

Anybody clever enough to get inside, physically or

figuratively, and shut a minor-deity-grade AI transputer

mesh down before it could so much as alert me, was playing

on a level so far out of my league that we were talking a

completely different game. And one that quite possibly

involved a completely other use for the halls.

I don‟t like projectile weapons. They might be all right - as I

think I might have mentioned, somewhere before - for waving

all heroically about if you‟re inclined to look the complete

tool, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred they‟re a

liability. But then again there‟s always that one chance in a

hundred, so I carry one - something big and multifunctional,

on the basis that if you‟re gonna do something then you do it

as hard as you can. I had the thing made up to my own

specs, at quite a bit of personal expense, I might add, and it

doesn‟t have a name you could ask for even if you knew

where to ask.

I hauled out the Gun and worked the door on manual

release, sidestepped with that kind of fluid motion you can

learn that fails to trigger danger signals, and scanned the

chamber in the ambient light from the doorway. It wasn‟t

quite enough for your basic human type to see by, but more

than enough for my somewhat special optic ganglia to see as

clear as day. (It‟s a hell of a job getting used to that at the

start, incidentally, and it can wreck your sleep in anything

other than pitch-darkness for months.)

Nothing out of place by so much as a micron. Nothing

gone. The only raw note was the translucent sphere of

mimetic gel depending from the ceiling, in which idiot and

random Mandelbrot-like generations swirled. Box was out for

the count. Someone or something had severely gone and

dormanted it.

Now, in a completely automated, hermetic and micro-

climatically controlled environment like an incorporate hive,

that might have been a catastrophic, even terminal problem.

Then again, those who think it‟s a neat idea to slave anything

and everything, from the lights to the comms to the air

supply, through a single processing unit, deserve everything

they get - and, like I said, I‟m not a complete and utter idiot.

In some respects, at least.

The lights and the landline-basic comms were on their own

systems. I left the former off and switched the phone to

playback. If anyone was still here then they‟d have known

that I was too from the instant I opened the door - I just

wanted the audio and the visual flicker from the phone to

mask my movements in the dark a little, and give me that

little potential edge that we all of us need sometimes to get

through life. Thus masked, I slipped over to the niche

containing Box‟s backup controls, popped the cover and fired

up the LCD display. The problem was obvious in an instant.

Person or persons unknown had used the backup controls

themselves to put Box into deep self-diagnostics, and the

process still had some several hundred thousand cycles left

to run.

I could think of any number of ways that would work

well enough, for long enough, to do this - and after-

wards you could have danced the tango naked with a pig

under your arm. The problem was, any of those ways

that didn‟t involve being me were so expensive, in terms

of both time and resources, that they could be practicably

handled only by one of the heavy outfits. I tried to think of

any of the Big Boys I might have offended recently and drew

a complete blank.

You don‟t cancel out of deep diagnosis in the same way as

you don‟t yank the bleep machines and bloodpacks in the

middle of exploratory surgery. I left the alcove and prowled

the chamber, stretching my sensitivity to the utmost, looking

for

any

clue

I

might

have

missed

the

first

time and listening to the messages streaming through the

phone with half an ear: ZipCo had been raiding the unlisted

registers again, and was treating me to a half-hour long

presentation, informing me of the various joys bestowed by

the ownership of anything from the hand-crafted head of

Tutankhamen in force-injected mica gel, to a genuine

reproduction of an antique vinyl inflatable woman. I made a

mental note, after Box was back on line, to reciprocate with a

small infobomb that would make their incorporate head

explode.

The droning perkiness of the voice from the phone was just

one of the specifics I was taking from the environment, and

integrating on some subconscious level that might fire up

something useful as I let my feet go where they wanted to

and my eyes rest where they felt like resting. This detached

but also, in some sense, completely focused state of mind is a

particular skill you learn in my line of work, and, though I

say it myself, I‟m rather proud of the ease with which I can

achieve it. It‟s one of those things inside, integral to you on

such a basic level that it‟s one of the things on which you can

truly count.

All in all, therefore, it was a bit dispiriting when my feet

took me out of the living chamber and into the kitchen, and

my eyes didn‟t notice a thing until I felt the cold burn of a

dermic spray against the side of my neck, and the world went

suddenly away.

The people who want me to write this are just interested in

the facts, and I‟m pushing it a bit even to set down my

relation to them - so anyone expecting one of those disjointed

and discursive dream-vision sequences that add a spot of

visual interest and, coincidentally, help bulk up a narrative

like nobody‟s business, are going to be disappointed.

The world came back again. There was no sense of

transition: I was simply and suddenly there and functioning

again. Face first on something flat and hard, cold

polyceramic pressing at my cheekbone - that would mean I‟d

been here no more than seconds as opposed to minutes, or

my body would have warmed it. (Refrigerating polyceramic

surfaces just so‟s to confuse the Cytoplasmically Enhanced

who happen to be lying on them would, in the general

scheme of things, be going a little bit too far.) I tried to work

out if the pain in my nose meant I had really broken it on the

way down.

My eyes happened to be closed, so I left them that way, lay

still and took stock from the inside out. Bodysense, he say

nothing missing from the body, nothing constricted and

nothing, apart from the nose, apparently broken. That was

always a good sign. The deep and relaxed feeling in my

muscles told me I‟d been hit with some kind of neurasthenic

- which I suppose was a good sign as well, neurasthenics

being commonly nonfatal to the point where you‟d sort of

notice the truckload it would take to overdose.

Apart from the feel of the floor - and believe me, I‟d woken

up on it enough times to recognize it - the general subliminal

pattern recognition of various electromagnetic hums, air-

conditioning mutters and the glonking groan of a slightly

faulty refrigeration motor told me I was still in my own

kitchen. A hard, sharp-edged and somewhat painful lump

under my groinal area told me I had fallen on my Gun,

concealing it or at least lodging it where only the brave might

dare to venture. Either that, of course, or I win presently

going to try to shoot someone with a handful of loose credit

plaques and a set of keys.

I strained my preternatural hearing to its limit. No sound of

breathing, no sound of those little moves that clothes make

when they move. If my recent and unwelcome visitor was

simply gone, of course, then all bets were off - but he might

just be in the other room.

The way to go now, I decided, was fast. Subtlety and

caution had failed thus far, and failed miserably, but speed

and recklessness might just carry whatsoever there was to

carry off. Up on to flat-soled feet in a bouncing roll, scooping

the Gun up as we go and boosting our momentum in a flat

dive to end up -

„I wouldn‟t have done that if I were you.‟ The voice had a

flattened-out, second-hand quality: some kind of voder-synth

that conveyed the words and intonation, but bleached out

anything that might identify the signal, even on the level of

sex or age. It was also coming, more or less precisely, from

directly behind me. „You‟re going in the wrong direction,

anyway.‟

I looked rather sheepishly back from where I‟d ploughed

into the carpet of the living chamber, at the figure lounging

against the breakfast counter. Just my luck. The guy was

wearing a Suit of Lights™.

That‟s something of a misnomer. A Suit of Lights™ can

range from those mood-suit recreational by-products of the

basic technology that project graphics and writing over you,

depending on how you feel at the time, to the military-spec

ones that deflect anything from the visible and otherwise

electromagnetic spectra, sound and even the gravmetic

pulses of sensors. It‟s not quite a cloak of complete

invisibility - you can see the wearer if you look really hard,

and know precisely where to look - but it‟s as near to it for all

practical purposes as dammit. And, to achieve the effect in a

place as generally sensor-and-surveillance-packed as the

Proximan Chain, you‟d need the sort of money to jack

military-spec off the scale.

That explained how my unwelcome visitor had slipped past

my defences for long enough to disable Box, and how I‟d

missed him even with my biological enhancements. Now that

inconspicuousness wasn‟t so much of an issue, the guy had

collapsed the field to present a kind of two-dimensional

silhouette look of utter blackness, covering him from head to

toe and wound with the tracery of golden wires that powered

the output units. Actually being able to see the guy now was

not that great a comfort, though, on account of the fact that I

could now see the gun he was holding, and pointing at my

gut, which was of the sort of genera] size and nastiness as to

suddenly make my own Gun feel very small, insignificant and

not a little put-upon.

„You know,‟ he said, lightly but still in that synthetic and

flattened-out voice, „for an enhanced Stratum Seven, you‟re

not exactly doing very well.‟ The jet-black head looked

pointedly at my Gun until I finally got the message and

lobbed it back to clatter across the kitchen floor, coming to

rest by his boot. (Note to self: get around, one of these days,

to implementing that idea of turning a Gun into an

impromptu fragmentation-grenade, should the need arise.)

„I‟m having a bit of an off day,‟ I said, trying to keep my

voice from sounding like it was trying to keep level. „You know

who I am, then.‟

„I know what you are,‟ said the guy. „Which is more to the

point, I‟ve read the file.‟

And then he mentioned something I keep utterly locked off.

Something that I know, for an absolute fact, never has and

never will be known about me. Something that I‟m certainly

not going to give so much as a hint of here - but, believe me,

there was simply no way anybody could know it, no matter

how much power, money or influence and any number of

resources they might have. My blood ran cold.

My visitor noticed my shock. „Oh, you‟d be amazed at the

kind of stuff we can get hold of for our files. Slice of

Battenberg. Piece of piss.‟

„What a lovely turn of phrase you do have,‟ I said, more or

less to slap a bit of cover on the fact of how genuinely shaken

I‟d been. „You must be the life and soul of the Spook Central

office party. So who‟s this we?‟

„You‟ll find out. For the moment, all you need to do is be

more than slightly afeared.‟ My visitor jerked his head

inwards the comms unit strapped to my wrist. „Take that off.‟

I unsnapped the clasps and took it off. „I hope you realize

that this fail-safe triggers several varieties of transputronic

shitstorm. Box is gonna come out of AI navel-gazing at some

point or other. I stay out of contact loo long, and several

terabytes of interesting info blanket-bombs the GalNet. Who

knows who or what might be hit by the fallout?‟

My visitor shrugged. „I think I‟ll risk it, rather than take my

attention away just to blow up your rig. Besides, anything

you have won‟t hurt. We wandered through your God Box,

two seconds after it ever went on line, and excised anything

that had so much as a whiff of us.‟

Party (not to put too fine a point upon it) pooper.

We went out through the access tunnel, my visitor still

holding his gun on me, not quite closely enough for me to do

anything about it, and seemingly unconcerned about

anybody we might meet. This is more professional doctrine

than otherwise, incidentally. In the holomovies you can‟t get

one step without some passer-by noticing, having hysterics

and screaming the place down, until armed cops

miraculously appear and a jolly spectacular firelight ensues -

but in real life you can take someone down a crowded street

like this, if you do it smoothly, people being generally rather

slow on the uptake.

In any event, we reached the drop and jump tube without

meeting anyone at all. Shooting upward at something

approaching Earth-normal gravity in reverse, I had a bit of

time to think. Somebody quite obviously wanted to talk to

me, and they expected me not to want to talk to them. They

didn‟t just want me dead, it being just as easy to load an

ejector with a neurotoxin as a neurasthenic, and even

simpler just to give someone the ol‟ Teflon-coated polyceramic

enema by way of a gun. This wasn‟t necessarily a heartening

sign - I could think of several nasty things, offhand, that

needed the subject alive at the start - but it was better than

most. Whatever might be waiting for me, my unwelcome

visitor clearly had orders to keep me alive and intact until

then, but just how far could I push this?

I was very carefully not thinking - so as to avoid

telegraphing it in any way - about the state of the gravmetics

in my particular Habitat, that particular shaft, and the small

fact that they tend to do this little faulty stutter at the top.

The only problem was, as in so much else, that the effect was

erratic. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn‟t; I couldn‟t

even count on the communal facilities to be completely crap.

They did. We lurched to a stop and dropped like a couple of

stones for a couple of metres before the field hit us again. I

was ready for the kick of it, but my unwelcome visitor was

not; he landed heavily against the charge, momentarily

winded. So, out of the kindness of my heart, I helped him out

by relieving him of those heavy guns he was carrying, and

planting a couple of fingers in his solar plexus for good

measure.

By that time the tube had spat us out, into the lobby of the

warren. Outside, through plate-glass windows, I could see

the city lights of the Habitat exterior itself and its

subsettlements, this one being a Habitat on a planetary body

with an atmosphere capable of supporting carbon-based life.

With one of those snap judgements you make so quickly that

you can‟t even call it a decision, I ignored the doors leading to

the outside and hustled my visitor down the ramps that led

to the warren‟s transit racks. If he was counting on taking me

somewhere, after all, he‟d have had to have transport and a

place to park.

As I‟d known there had to be, a sleek-lined floater sat

unracked with its gravmetics idling: one of those flashy,

mean-looking jobs that are used by the people who know that

a vehicle bending over backward to look nondescript and

drab just screams out cop or the locally applicable equivalent.

The way it sat in the air told me that my unwelcome visitor

hadn‟t brought along a little friend, so I dragged him over to

the floater and shot the doors, sort of counting on any

reaction he would have had to tell me if they were booby-

trapped or not. I shoved him inside, motioned with the gun

for him to slither over to the shotgun seat and got in behind

him.

In passing, I noticed that the autodrive had been set to a

preprogrammed destination, no doubt for effecting a speedy

exit under conditions of stress. What the hell. I decided to

push it and see what happened.

Now at this point the attentive reader will no doubt have a

number of questions. Isn‟t it obvious, he or she will ask, that

the autopilot will promptly take our chap right to the very lair

of those who wish him harm? Just what, he or she will

further enquire, does our chap think he is playing at? Has

our chap not, in short, the attentive reader will reflect,

suddenly and for no apparent reason transposed the

contents of the cranium and colon?

The answers to which are: simple, obviously, and don‟t you

take that tone with me. Whoever my unwelcome visitor was

working for was out to get me and, given what he had let

drop back in my apartment chambers, they were operating

on a level such that I‟d never find them if I tried. The simple

solution was to go where they, by definition, had to be

waiting for me - and dust the fact of what you might call the

redefining of relationships with my would-be kidnapper to get

me out of it alive.

All of which seemed reasonable and logical at the time -

but, as the flier hurtled through the trackways and transit

gates that cross-connect through the Habitats of the Chain

like the microtubular substructure of the human brain, I

began to have my doubts. The windows of the floater were

polarized to maximum, and I couldn‟t seem to find a way to

switch it off; there was no way to see out. I could end up

almost anywhere. I began to get the distinct feeling, what

with one thing and another, that I‟d merely been

participating in some elaborate charade that had me actively

kidnapping myself.

Abruptly, the floater slammed to a stop, throwing both me

and my unwelcome visitor against the crashbars. After I

could breathe again, and had decided that half of my ribs

weren‟t really broken, I broke open the gun I‟d liberated from

my visitor, pocketed the charges and tossed it to him,

keeping him covered with my own Gun all the while.

„Now what we‟re going to do is this,‟ I said. „You get out and

stand there looking all mysterious and butch and in control

of things, which should give me the chance to see what‟s

going on.‟

I reset the floater‟s autodrive to scram if what was going on

turned out to be nasty, keying in the destination of a kimu

bar to which I was partial, simply because it was an address

off the top of my head. Then I shot the shotgun hatch and

shoved my visitor out, slid myself into the seat he had

formerly occupied and stuck my head out on a low level from

which one wouldn‟t ordinarily expect a head to be protruding

from a car.

I snapped my head back and considered the image etched

on my mind: standard transit-rack space, more or less the

same as that we‟d left save for the little unimportant details

of its condition that told me we‟d come to a slightly more

expensive area. The only important detail was a scan-

activated security-access door, such as you‟d expect to find

in the spaces of the rich. Armed men waiting to jump on me

or automated blaster packages in the walls were conspicuous

by their absence.

I decided to risk it, climbed out of the car and shoved my

unwelcome visitor towards the security door. Take us in. And

you go first.‟

He shrugged, his silhouette-like body posture, apparently,

unconcerned. „I‟m going to have to take my mask off for the

scan.‟

„So do it,‟ I said, keeping him covered with my Gun.

My unwelcome visitor did so.

„Well fuck me sideways and stick me on a pole,‟ I said,

putting the Gun away. „You could have fucking told me.‟

„I suspect the correct reply would be that you didn‟t fucking

ask,‟ said Bernice Summerfield, archly, „but words such as

that shall never sully my lips.‟

BACKGROUND 1

You know, when I hear people saying how they feel

ambivalent or in two minds about something, I get this sort

of inappropriately cheery urge to laugh up my sleeve. It‟s a

bit like watching old propaganda material about a war you

were actually in with all those chaps going off to do their bit,

or listening to the sort of moron who believes a population

armed with guns is a good thing, without having the slightest

clue of what a gun actually does. To go off on one of my

famous peripheral tangents, I think that anyone who even so

much as thinks of carrying a gun ought to be shot to death by

one and see how he likes it - and that‟s not, in my case, quite

the reductio ad absurdum it might seem.

The point is that you simply can‟t understand how some

things feel if you haven‟t gone through them. I mean, in my

case, on the one hand I have a full and complete memory of a

childhood, adolescence, years spent in the hell of a city under

martial law which culminated in a bunch of hollow-points

exploding through my guts... and on the other hand, in a

completely different sense, I know who, or rather what, I

really am.

Now I can go over the traces any number of times - and,

believe me, I have, in my head - wondering just what was

true, what wasn‟t and just how much of what I‟ve been told

by people was ultimately a lie, and we‟d be no nearer to the

end of it by the time the Sky Wolf eats every applicable Sun.

Certain facts check out, so far as I‟ve been able to check

them, but the problem with thinking in terms of bluff and

counterbluff is that there‟s always at least one more level of

possible misdirection. In physics this is known as the

Catastrophe of Infinite Regression - you have to calibrate one

measuring device with another, which needs to be calibrated

itself, and so on.

The loop is broken only by the conscious and subjective

choice of the observer, and so, in the end, it‟s probably better

to just let it lie, and go with the explanation I got, all those

years ago, on waking up in a hospital bed to see a beautiful

but wrong-looking woman...

„My name‟s Kara,‟ the woman said as I tried and failed to

fight against the restraints holding me, noting in passing that

they seemed to be constructed from smooth bands of thick

ceramic, held along the seams by some kind of electronic

bolts. „Kara Delbane. And you are an APE – an Artificial

Personality Embodiment - built up for us in the Catan

Nebula, and you‟ve only just this minute come on line.

Remember that, that‟s important.‟

I stopped struggling as some detached and utterly rational

part of my mind realized that struggling wasn‟t doing any

good, and made myself relax. At the time there didn‟t seem

anything difficult or remarkable about it, but I would later

find that from the outside it was as if a switch had been

thrown, switching me off so that I went instantly and utterly

limp. This instant switching of emotions, I further learnt, was

one of the enhancements my new body had over the basic

human form: a degree of conscious control over brain and

lymbic and hormonal functions that would make an Indian

fakir sick.

“Waking with a new body is entirely outside of your range

of experience,‟ the woman, Delbane, was saying. „You‟ve been

prepped, posthypnotically, but it‟s still got to be one hell of a

shock. Those restraints are there to stop you damaging

yourself while you go through it.‟

„OK,‟ I said, perfectly calm, and reasonable, and not buying

any of this for one instant. „I‟m not in shock now. Could you

take the restraints off?‟

„You know, I‟m not sure whether to envy you or not,‟

Delbane continued, seemingly oblivious to my heartfelt plea.

„Every other APE is fitted with a back-story cobbled together

out of old parts - I mean, I was this Warrior Princess

wandering around Ancient Greece, with tits of death and this

incredibly horny sidekick with a quarter-staff, till a daughter

of hers who was actually the Spawn of Hell sent me into the

Country of the Amazons and then into the future...‟

Delbane realized I was looking at her as if she had gone

round the twist.

„Well, anyway,‟ she said a bit self-consciously. They give us

these memory-construct stories to stop us flipping out the

minute we‟re switched on, but you‟re a special case. You have

to be treated a little differently. If you take a look at this, it

should give you the skinny better than I ever can.‟

As she spoke, Delbane was pulling down a globular monitor

unit on a kind of pneumatic and articulated arm attached to

the ceiling. She switched it on and a 2-D logo flowered on the

phosphor coating: one of those ineptly nasty and overblown

images you find on fighter-plane fuselages and military-

personnel tattoos, which contrive to suggest that those

involved have listened to far too many bands made up of fat,

pig-ugly and long-haired old gits from Birmingham with a

predilection for spandex. A grinning skeleton with ragged,

batlike angel wings and a flaming sword.

There‟s a trackpad under your right hand,‟ said Delbane.

„You‟ll get the hang of it.‟

I felt around with my right hand and the graphic dissolved

to a menu. I looked at it impassively for a moment, then

turned my head to Delbane. „Is this,‟ I said, keeping my voice

neutral, „what I think it is?‟

At least she had the grace to look a little shamefaced.

„Yeah,‟ she said. „It‟s what it looks like.‟

It‟s one of those things you simply will not get, quite

frankly, if it‟s never happened to you. Well it‟s happened to

me, so let me just say this about myself, and you just keep

this in mind for if and when you ever come in contact with an

APE and think that he or she might have a chip on their

shoulder about certain things. I came with a manual - can

you believe that? I can‟t, and I‟m the person who it came

with. I‟ve still got a copy of the damned thing, somewhere -

but you‟re never gonna get so much as a sniff of where it is,

for the simple reason that the last thing I need is people

knowing precisely what makes me tick down to the last

designers‟ specification. Let me just run over the immediately

relevant points of it here:

The common or biogenic-vat APE is basically built from

scratch, the blank template of its mind being stamped with

specious memories that allow it to function in the world it

wakes up into when it‟s activated. A space pilot who spent

five hundred years cryogenically frozen due to a life-support

malfunction, a warrior sent from one world to another by an

evil wizard, a feisty young kid picked up by an eccentric time-

travelling alien to serve as his companion as he adventures

through time and space, that sort of thing... all of these

stories complete bollocks, of course, but all of them designed

to come up with an at least halfway consistent explanation as

to why this APE has suddenly woken up somewhere strange.

The procedure ranges from the low-end and disposable

APEs, intended for suicide missions and the like (who exhibit

nothing but psychosis, or an absolutely fanatical religious

fundamentalism that holds well enough for long enough until

the hi-ex strapped to their bodies or the car bomb they‟re

driving goes boom) to the top-of-the-range units, with maybe

thirty-five or more subjective years of more-or-less self-

consistent material inside them – people of a certain, specific

and preprogrammed character type, whom the various

factions and powers of the galaxy place at certain times and

places as a part of their more involved and complex

machinations.

Now the low-end disposables simply don‟t count, and the

high-enders are indistinguishable from real people anyway,

save for the fact that they‟ve suddenly appeared from

somewhere, at a certain place and time, out of the blue. The

interesting thing is those in the mid- range, those APEs who

are used and reused for high-risk but sustained work. The

soldiering and slave work in those areas where a real human

is needed but no human in their right mind would ever go.

APEs who need to be intelligent, and with broadly human

emotions and responses for the work they do. It‟s just not

cost-effective to fit them with the kind of detailed virtual lives

that the top of the range has - and so at some point, if they

survive long enough, they realize that their so-called lives

and memories have so many holes in them they could give

Swiss cheese a run for its money.

This is the point that these mid-range APEs begin the

process of realizing who they are, and begin the long and

tortuous road to being truly self-aware. This is what‟s known

in the Catan Nebula manufactories as their „breakout

lifetime‟, and every APE sold has a breakout rating. There are

one hell of a lot of horror stories about the buyers simply

disposing of them when that happens, but the general

consensus is that, once an APE breaks out, he or she

becomes a Sentient Being in the legal sense, and, In theory,

enjoys the same rights, privileges and freedoms us most

other beings in the galaxy have by way of being born. In

practice, though, these broken APEs have the freedom to go

into a certain line of work, most human occupations being

barred to them, or starve.

The reason I‟ve gone into the background details here is to

make the point that I don‟t fit in with any of them. I‟d had

childhood experience with intuitive computer interfaces, and,

as I navigated my way through the manual, I became aware

that it was detailing the specs of a custom job, a one-of-a-

kind limited edition.

The false memories with which the Catan Nebula manu-

factories implant their product are in fact derived from a

cache of units from what was known as Think-Tanking, a

prototypical process used by various military powers on

Earth, five hundred years ago, for interrogational purposes.

The process involved mapping the synaptic pattern of a

subject into a clock of biographic gel, destroying the subject‟s

brain as it did so, to produce a working model of the subject‟s

thought patterns, personality and memory with a complexity

and specific detail that has never been bettered before or

since. A stockpile of these prototypes was uncovered around

a century ago, and has since, as I said, formed the basis for

the manufacturing processes of the Catan Nebula.

One of these Think-Tank recordings, however, was used in

an abortive attempt at longevity research – mapping the

engram back into an APE-based, humanoid host brain in its

entirety, via a procedure that destroyed the Think-Tank

storage medium in much the same way as was the original

brain to make the recording in the first place. The idea was, I

gather, to eventually market the procedure to the dying rich

as the ultimate form of transplant, a complete body swap

with even a spanky new brain included.

The idea failed for the simple reason that the dying rich -

who might be dying, but weren‟t bloody fools or they wouldn‟t

be rich - spotted the fatal, as it were, flaw. This was not, they

pointed out, some means of somehow magically transferring

the soul - or whatever you wanted to call it - into a new and

healthy body and brain. This was a way of getting your brain

sliced up, then having some complete stranger running

around thinking he was you, while you yourself were in fact

deader than a three-week-old turd.

So the project was canned. The stock of Think-Tank

engrams was too valuable and irreplaceable to monkey

around with finding alternative applications for the

procedure, so all that remained to be dealt with was the

prototypically implanted APE. Fortunately for me, if nobody

else, they‟d sunk enough cash into me that they were looking

for a way to recoup some of it, rather than just write it off

and dispose of me. My body itself was top-of-the-line, with

the kind of physical resilience, reflex actions and repair

factors that put me off the human scale, and the designers

had taken the opportunity, since it was just there and lying

around, to try out certain improvements that years later

would become industry-standard, but which at the time were

cutting-edge like you wouldn‟t believe. All of these factors

made me valuable in and of myself, so they just wiped a few

memories of the experimental period here, added a few

psycho-conditioning blocks there, stuck translation implants

and whatnot in my paracerebellum and knocked me out as a

collectors‟ item. And, given the uses to which some

„collectors‟ put their APEs, I count myself luckier than

otherwise that I ended up where I actually did.

I‟ve since wondered just how many undocumented „features‟

made it into the mix of me, in the way that such things do,

but the specs in the manual were impressive enough. My

bloodstream stores enough oxygen to survive fifteen minutes

of strenuous effort in a vacuum, for example, and at a pinch,

in an appropriate environment, I can bypass my primary

respiratory system entirely and spend a couple of hours

breathing through my skin. Natural immunity to various

toxins and antigens, a digestive system like a chemical-

cracker and a cardiovascular system that might not actually

include what the promotional literature calls a „second heart‟,

but does have something that serves as the equivalent of a

fuel-injection pump. My brain has at least six levels of

physical redundancy, six duplications of the synapse map

that cross-connect and allow the personality to survive severe

damage. On the whole it was almost worth getting shot, dying

and having your brain sliced to wake up and find you‟ve

stolen the best body in the shop.

As I flipped through this information with one part of my

mind, though, another part of it was interested In something

else, and very busy indeed. My Catan manufacturers, I

realized, had supplemented my original memories with

certain other things: direct knowledge of several languages,

including the Galactic Basic – which was an evolved variation

upon English in any case – and a general knowledge of the

current state of the known galaxy, so that I knew what a

Slorg was, for example, and what it looked like, without ever

having seen one. It wasn‟t as if this knowledge popped into

my head or anything: it was integral to me, to be called upon

when I happened to need it, in the same way that someone

might still know what a lemon is, even if he just hasn‟t

happened to think of a lemon for weeks.

One of these little additions was a working knowledge of

the transputer-based informational technology of the time.

From the instant I‟d accessed the manual, I‟d known it was a

file loaded into a program over the quasi-autonomous

operating subsystem of the monitor unit, which was in turn

semi-slaved to the overall administrative operating system of

some large installation - possibly a building, possibly a ship.

With my Catan-implanted knowledge, I‟d been able to open

up an unobtrusive little command window of my own - and,

by the time the other part of my mind was reading about how

my skeletal structure had been enhanced by way of long-

chain carbon molecules, I was rooting happily around in the

security systems, looking for the proper set of protocols.

By the time I was reading about the microcustomized rods

and cones in my eyeballs, I had them.

„Oh my God...‟ I said, in a frightened tone of voice. „Is that

right? Does that mean what I think it means?‟

„What?‟ said Delbane, who had been growing bored.

„Look at this,‟ I said.

Delbane walked over and craned her head so that she

could see the monitor. I triggered the proper set of protocols,

the restraints holding me to the bed snapped back, and I hit

the exposed side of her neck with the side of my hand. I

didn‟t clip her hard, just enough to put her down for a couple

of seconds - and there was no conscious thinking about this:

I just knew precisely how hard to hit her and where.

Off the bed and out of the door I‟d seen off to one side, the

existence of which had been on my mind for quite some

while. My real thoughts and memories were in command

now, the thoughts and memories of the man fighting the

guerrilla war against the Emergency Military Government

who had declared martial law upon his home, and they had

decided on the strategy of speed. I didn‟t have clue one about

what was really happening here. There could be any number

of ways it was set up, and the only way to go was to keep

moving as fast as I could.

It was a setup, of course. I got two paces out of the door

and caught a glimpse of bulkheads, gangways and hatches

reminiscent of a twentieth-century naval vessel, before a bolt

of some energy weapon blasted me from above and drove me

to the steel-plate deck. I hadn‟t caught so much as a whiff of

the existence of something like that outside the door, of

course, in all my rooting around in the security systems, on

account of how my rooting around in them had been a part of

the setup in the first place.

I lay there twitching for a while, flat on my face, every nerve

in my body febrile with what felt like a static-electrical shock

that seemed to want to hang around either than discharge

itself, until Delbane hauled me over, being none too gentle

about it. I looked up at her impassive face - and at the

monitor unit some way past it, depending from the ceiling in

much the same way as the one in the hospital chamber, but

this time with a face made up of crude symbols, almost

exactly like this:

- -

@ @

>

+++++++++++

„Oh, you have got to be kidding me,‟ I said through

chattering teeth.

„I never kid,‟ said a voice from the unit, cheerfully, unless

it‟s a really, really funny joke.‟ The voice seemed perfectly and

unremarkably human, if with a kind of childish, grating

quality that I just knew was going to have me wanting to hit

the owner with a claw hammer in about two minutes flat. The

image merely jiggled with every word, the little „>„ symbol of

its nose switching direction couple of times.

„Well, you seem to be up and functioning,‟ said the voice,

„within your basic parameters. I‟m ARVID. I own you.

Welcome to the Oblivion Angels.‟

CHAPTER 2

There are basically two ways you could know the name of

Bernice Surprise Summerfield. The first is through the

Adventures of the New Frontier - those story-data packs that

turn up on the newsstands and spaceport lounges

throughout the population centres of the galaxy, purporting

to tell, in sensational and excruciatingly badly written form,

about what life is supposed to be like everywhere else. Benny

is a bit of a star in these on the quiet, her life being

apparently that of a cross between a lady adventurer,

amateur detective and a space pirate with a heart of gold,

roaming the universe with her wicked little throwing knives,

an impossibly dumb Willie-Garvin-knockoff sidekick by the

name of Jason Kane and getting into far too many sticky

situations for her own good.

I‟m here to tell you, naturally, that the New Frontier

Adventures are complete and utter toss. I‟ve appeared in a

number of the things myself, and the last I looked I‟ve never

been a sadistic mercenary/assassin minion for some galactic

villain, with so many interesting little sadistic peccadillos it‟s

a wonder I don‟t implode up my own arse, and a knack for

seeming to die two-thirds in, only to come spectacularly back

and be dispatched for the sting in the tail. The fact that I‟ve

killed people in my time and got paid for it - or the fact that I

actually have died, once – is beside the point

The other way is to know her personally. I‟d met her some

months back, on a job for Pseudopod Enterprises that had

taken me to the blockaded world of Dellah. She had not been

feeling herself at the time, for various reasons, but she had

rallied by the end of things to help me expose the fraudulent

machinations of the Pseudopod local representative on

nearby Thanaxos and, incidentally save the entire galactic

sector from Fiendish Entities from the Dawn of Time or some

such.

Benny Summerfield was and is, ostensibly, an

archaeologist in the same way Mata Hari would have been, if

Mata Hari had known the first thing about archaeology It‟s

not a front, precisely, in that she‟s fully if indeterminately

qualified and with the practical learning, skills and published

work to prove it - it‟s just not the centre of her life, if you get

what I mean, which has led her into connections and

entanglements that the New Frontier Adventures couldn‟t

even begin to touch upon without a pocket-singularity

suddenly appearing in their offices and wiping them out by

courtesy of the Reality Police.

To cut a long story short, we‟d gone through quite a lot

together in a short period of time; I‟d liked her and pretty

much trusted her. This made all the stuff with the gun and

the Suit of Lights™ all the more puzzling and not a little

hurtful.

„What the hell are you playing at?‟ I asked her, after she

had shown her face for the scan and we were waiting for

what, by the sound of it from behind the doors, was an

actual elevator to arrive.

„There are certain factors involved,‟ Bernice said. „Suffice it

to say that he had to contact you circumspectly. I‟m

supposed to be taking you to someone who can explain -

we‟re not trying to kill you or anything like that.‟

The use of the word „kill‟ reassured me somewhat – it was a

word that someone trying to reassure someone they really

were going to kill would consciously avoid like first-contact

syndrome. I re-evaluated the balance of trust a minor

increment in favour of the Summerfield party, while making a

mental note to be sure to count the teeth and the number of

legs on each end.

As we travelled up in the sort of brass-and-red-plush

elevator cage that some designer had probably thought to be

a thematic evocation of the elegance of the nineteenth

century, I looked at Bernice Summerfield closely, trying not

to be too obvious about it, now that I could see her face.

When I‟d met her before, she had been on the ragged edge

between malnutrition and terminal starvation; now she had

filled out again and the light was on in her eyes. All the same,

though, there were a number of new lines tinder them and I

got the impression of - not illness, precisely, but more of a

kind of exhausted determination one gets when one is

determinedly holding some illness off.

Bernice caught me looking at her and shot me a mock glare

that, momentarily, infused her face with a kind of gleeful joie

de vivre that had informed the stills I‟d first seen of her,

researching the background for the Dellah sector job, before

we‟d actually met.

„There‟s nothing wrong,‟ she said, in answer to my

unspoken question. „There‟s nothing wrong with me.‟

Since she obviously almost believed it herself, I let it drop

and squirrelled it away for consideration later. It wasn‟t any

of my business.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened on to a spare

and smallish, pastel-surfaced anteroom, the only items of

furniture being two unoccupied, matching, antique rococo

chairs, one on either side of mahogany doors, on which a

couple of footmen in full periwigged costume might sit at idle

moments. I got the impression - here and later – of being in

the sort of setup you see in those surviving 1930s Hollywood

cinematographs, where the Wealthiest Tycoon in the World

swans around his plush apartments running his global

business concerns by way of drinking martinis, smoking from

ebony fag-holders, playing the piano and marrying peroxide

blondes who think he‟s a gas-pump jockey, without doing a

stroke of actual work.

Bernice left the elevator and headed straight for the two

doors. I let her go first on the not-being-born-yesterday

principle and followed somewhat more cautiously behind.

Beyond, a chamber more or less confirming my Hollywood

impression: Art Deco forms and a terraced floor, sparse and

dated-looking Futurism (the point about Futurism being that

it‟s supposed to look dated, whichever date it happens to be

in), a sweeping curve of wall space that presumably housed

windows, over which the drapes were drawn - I never did

discover where this place really was, in purely positional

terms, and positional terms are all relative in the Proximan

Chain in any case.

Standing amid this, as though waiting for his cue, was an

elegant man in a razor-sharp suit. He turned, as if on cue, as

Bernice and I entered, and smiled with what appeared to be

genuine delight.

„Ah, Benny,‟ said Irving Braxiatel, „I see that your

endeavours have been not entirely unfruitful.‟

Yes, that Irving Braxiatel. The one with the New Collection

where you can witness the whole vast panoply of galactic

history, in twenty minutes flat, by way of a photophosphic

dome and a little cart on gimbals and some really dodgy

animatronics; where you can research the records extant

from a thousand worlds if you can go through the

machinations of getting a pass card, wander through the

serried and terraced halls packed full to bursting with the

items they‟ve decided to let out of the vaults, consume

hideously overpriced chai and biscuits in the tearooms and

come away with a stuffed Hairy Rolf the Collection-going

Possum and a badge saying I‟VE SEEN THE PLTHOI.

Braxiatel was the sole and freehold owner of this concern,

and had been one of the guiding lights within the now-

destroyed University on Dellah - and this made it all the more

worrying, here and now, because I knew all of the above to be

a front There are certain... powers in the universe, factions of

opposition that stand as to the multiplexal, civil, social and

criminal factions of my world as do mythological gods and

Titans to man - and Braxiatel, on all the evidence, was

hooked directly into them. Whether on one side or the other I

had no idea and couldn‟t care less. The nearest I‟d ever got to

being involved on that level was when I „d got mixed up with

the Dellahan situation - and that had been more than

enough for me.

„Good evening,‟ Braxiatel said to me.

„Whatever it is,‟ I said to him, „I‟m not interested. Let‟s get

that clear from the start.‟

Braxiatel smiled slightly. „I had the feeling you might be

reluctant, initially. That‟s why I‟ve taken the liberty of

transferring certain funds into your...‟

He trailed off and his smile slipped uncertainly. Whether he

was looking at my expression or Summerfield‟s, I was too

busy controlling myself to tell for the moment.

„Oh you idiot, Irving,‟ Bernice snapped, off to one side. „I

told you not to do that.‟

Now, listen, if you really could boil life down into the good

guys and the bad guys like they do in the holomovie crap, I

suppose I‟d be one of the latter. You know the sort of thing I

mean: one of those mob enforcers who try to put (he pressure

on Our Hero‟s friends, the hit man against whom Our Hero

has to protect some grass, the guy from the Evil Corporation

who bumps off the inventor of a car that runs on cheese,

working for the highest bidder, whomsoever it might be, and

with the moral sensibilities of the same size and general

constitution of a rat‟s squit.

In real life that just ain‟t so. I‟m a licensed security

operative with a Stratum Seven clearance and that might not

sound like much to you but, believe me, it‟s tied up with deep

and highly formalized codes of honour and conduct. We do

not sell ourselves and can‟t be bought. We choose to give our

loyalty, to a strict contract of agreed parameters, in return for

what it‟s worth. The more abstruse and contractual

complexities of this are beside the point, here - but the

upshot was that sticking money into my accounts unasked

for, assuming that would buy me, was perhaps the worst

insult imaginable a man could give to someone in my line of

work.

„Get this guy away from me,‟ I said to Bernice in a flat and

neutral tone, and had the pleasure of watching Braxiatel

blanch a little with the reaction that tone always seems to

provoke. „Get him out before I do something he‟s going to

regret.‟

„Go and see if you can cancel the transfer,‟ Bernice told

him. It was only later that I wondered about the fact that she

seemed perfectly at home with ordering one of the richest and

most powerful men in the Sector around – it didn‟t seem to

be about power levels and so forth, more of a momentary

dispute between friends. „Bring us the stuff he needs to see

as well.‟

„I told you,‟ I said to her, as Braxiatel hurriedly left by way

of a small side door, „I‟m not interested, whatever it is.

Doubly uninterested, now. Can I go home?‟

„Look, I‟m really sorry about that.‟ Bernice sighed in a

manner reminiscent of a parent apologizing for the antics of a

bright but basically naive child. „Irving knows more about

almost everything than you or I‟ll ever know, but he hits this

occasional blind spot when it comes to people things. He

really didn‟t mean anything by it.‟

For a moment she looked down tiredly at the carpet, the

overall

brownish-neutral

tone

of

which

comprised

interlocking, primary-colour, abstract shapes suggestive of

saxophones. Then she looked up again, the tiredness I‟d

noticed before more evident in her eyes. „OK. You don‟t want

a job - but there are things you really need to know. If you

don‟t know what we‟re doing here, and how it might affect

you, you could be in serious danger.‟

„What, more serious danger than normal‟?‟ I said. „Why do I

get the feeling people have been monkeying around behind

the scenes and screwing my life up? What have you gone and

dropped me in?‟

Bernice sucked at her bottom lip with a little non-

committal expression. „Probably nothing you need worry

about, unless you‟d actually decided to work with us. I just

don‟t want you to walk away now and be completely

unprepared. For one thing, you have to know that your

apartments are being monitored.‟

„Is that so?‟ I shrugged. „That‟s nothing out of the ordinary.

We‟re in the Proximan Chain. People wander through the

systems and pick stuff up by the truckload.‟

„I mean actively monitored,‟ said Bernice. „We know that

because we were the ones who set it up.‟

Braxiatel had returned by this time, clutching a sheaf of

hard-copy printout and a bulky and archaic dossier folder

made of actual pink cardboard. Bernice reached out and look

some sheets of printout from him and handed them to me,

and I flipped through them in desultory fashion. Text

transcripts - physically typed on genuine wood-and-rag pulp

paper - of oral conversation which sounded vaguely like me,

given that nobody can really know what the hell they sound

like when they‟re just wandering around and muttering to

themselves on their own.

„OK, so I‟m being actively monitored,‟ I said. „Stay tuned for

some eardrum-bursting sonic pulses in the near future.‟ I

waggled the transcripts meaningfully. „This all seems to be a

little bit of what you might call low-tech, if you don‟t mind me

remarking.‟

Bernice smiled slightly. „Doctrine of contextual reversal.

The more hi-tech an environment is, the greater the chance

that simplifying things and doing them the good old way

slides underneath it and remains secure. I learnt that from

an Artificial Personality Embodiment a bit like you I once

knew, a woman who called herself the Cat‟s Paw, but that‟s

neither here nor there. Also -‟ she shot a glance to Braxiatel „-

it‟s all a bit of a part and parcel of Irving‟s frankly

idiosyncratic way of doing things.‟

„Is that so?‟ The mention of an APE like me had put me on

the defensive, somewhat. My unique and special status, so

far as things like the process of building Artificial Personality

Embodiments goes, means I could be either considered one of

them of the most extreme kind, or not one at all - the upshot

being that I tend to catch the flak from both sides. „So where

do you get off sticking a bug up my personal arse? Just what

are you doing here that you need to keep tabs on me?‟

„We‟re here because there have been some alarming

developments in the Dellah situation,‟ said Braxiatel.

„What?‟ My blood ran suddenly cold to the extent that I

forgot I was supposed to be ignoring him with a lofty hauteur.

„Don‟t tell me Prince Jimbo’s risen from the lead-lined coffin or

something.‟

„Nothing like that,‟ Bernice assured me, „or, at least, so we

think. The last thing we heard on that matter, the Thanaxon

Council had voted to build a quite extensive seven-thousand-

tonne monument on top of it. Possibly due to some

unconscious fear of that very thing happening – or some

other abstruse but locally relevant reason, of course.‟

Braxiatel was now absently busying himself with a

lacquered drinks cabinet, mixing a stiff cocktail – almost

exactly of the sort I‟d imagined in the anteroom - in a chrome

shaker and pouring it into a brace of crystal tumblers. He

handed one to Bernice, who took it gratefully, proffered the

other to me, and when I refused kept the glass held

negligently and unregarded in his hand.

„As you know,‟ he said, „the godlike entities that caused so

much trouble are now, supposedly, hemmed in on Dellah by

the blockade, but it‟s impossible for the forces of Earth,

however admirable they might be, to be everywhere, and

things slip through the cracks. We‟ve attempted to monitor

the situation up on Dellah itself, making use of certain...

items of equipment in the St Oscar‟s Department of Advanced

Studies, which escaped the general sacking of the university

somewhat intact – but a few months ago all contact with the

department was suddenly lost. Almost simultaneously,

certain incidents, that led to rumours, that led to reports of

which we became aware, began to occur here in the

Proximan Chain. Murders of a certain sort. Monomaniacal

behaviour of a particular kind. The pattern is entirely

distinctive...‟

„Which means,‟ Bernice cut in, „that we don‟t just think one

of these entities escaped from Dellah and is at large. We know

an entity is here, somewhere, building up its influence and

on the point of going overt big time. We‟re now talking about

a matter of days, unless we find it and stop it, before the

Proximan Chain is hit by a Belief Quake as big as the world.‟

„To this end,‟ said Braxiatel, „we‟ve been conducting an

investigation, utilizing the talents and skills, primarily, of

Artificial Personality Embodiments like yourself on the

suggestion of Bernice - who realized from her previous

association with yourself that the synthetically imposed

nature of your consciousness presented something of a blind

spot to these entities, thus allowing us to work with some

degree of secrecy…‟

„Now hang on,‟ I said, the importance of the situation

overriding my initial resolution not to get involved with it in

any shape or form. „Why wasn‟t I brought in on this from day

one? I‟ve got the background and the experience with these

things that would have put us on the same page at the start.

Are you going to tell me that I don‟t have the skills or

something?‟

„I wanted to,‟ Bernice said, „but Irving thought you might

pose a security risk. You‟ve been on Dellah, physically

exposed to the gods en masse, and were instrumental in

setting back their plans on Thanaxos. They know who you

are.‟

„Besides which,‟ said Braxiatel, airily, „your little sojourn in

the ruins of the university exposed you to a healthy dose of

the emissions from the Advanced Studies block yourself. Who

knows what sort of contamination you might have picked up

from that.‟

„So we decided to leave well enough alone,‟ said Bernice.

„We kept an eye on you and stayed clear.‟

„So what‟s changed now?‟ I asked, making a little mental

note to find out just what sort of „contamination‟ they were

talking about as soon as possible, if necessary at gunpoint.

„Why did you decide to contact me now?‟

„Because security‟s been busted wide open,‟ said Bernice.

„One of our APE operatives has been murdered. One of the

people keeping an eye on you, in fact. Her name was Kara

Delbane.‟

BACKGROUND 2

The Oblivion Angels were one of those slightly ambiguous

concerns that by the unkind would be called mercenaries

and the more kindly disposed would refer to as

troubleshooters. Originally set up by an incorporate

consortium, in a fit of galactic gunboat diplomacy, to look out

for their common interests in the galaxy at large, they broke

away from their patrons by way of being too heavily and

lethally armed to make it worth the incorporations going

against them directly. It was simply easier all round to agree

to the Angels‟ politely worded request that they be granted

autonomous and freelance status.

Functionally, however, there was no real change. The

Oblivion Angels roamed the galaxy in their mile-wide Ship,

doing in a big and paramilitary way what I myself would do,

in later years, in a small way - working for the multiplexes on

commission when the application of direct military force was

applied. Their personnel were drawn from human and alien

ex-soldiers, APEs who had achieved breakout (this being one

of the few jobs they could get) and APEs bought in directly

from the Catan Nebula. Over the years the command

structure within the Ship - which had no other name,

incidentally – had evolved into a quite complex society in its

own right, a kind of hi-tech warrior clan.

I knew some of this in general from my Catan-implanted

knowledge, and learnt more of it in particular some time later

- but I have to say that, in the course of my first job for them,

I didn‟t get to see any of it except for a couple of bare

compartments, and never met one of them but Kara Delbane,

a couple of technicians and ARVID. The implanted knowledge

in my head dropped in the useful item of information that

this

stood

for

Artificial

Viral-based

Intelligence

Destabilization - a process that produced cheap AIs at the

cost of a short lifetime and a somewhat erratic approach to

interactive behaviour.

„We bought you for a one-off job,‟ it said, after Delbane had

marched me down a gangway from the recovery room to a set

of Spartan living quarters that consisted of a bunk and an

ablutionary stall, like a prison cell. „You‟re equipment and

that‟s all you are, chum.‟ The crude symbol face in the

ubiquitous ceiling monitor somehow contrived to make itself

sneer without changing at all. „I‟m not exactly a quality

product, like you supposedly are, but I‟ve got more status

than you‟ll ever dream of, let alone ever have.‟

„And I have more status than you, ARVID,‟ said Kara, who

had hung around after bringing me here, and now instantly

earned herself a small note in my good books by her

somewhat angry reaction. „Such as it is. What‟s got into you?

Why are you coming it like the little Pinochet?‟

„Look, I‟m just trying to give him the score, Kara,‟ the voice

said. The guy‟s been out of the packing crate, what, five

minutes, and this is the best way to tell him he‟s been

screwed completely before he‟s even got a proper go...‟

(The mention of „five minutes‟, incidentally, gave me one of

those little insights to which I‟m sometimes prone. Without

an external benchmark, with it just being two APEs together,

both I and Delbane had fallen into our own rhythm and pace

and not noticed. To a basic human type it would have

seemed that we‟d been jittering and jabbering away together

in the recovery room like a holomovie on fast forward, fitting

maybe half an hour‟s worth of conversation and interaction

into a few minutes. The sort of zippy shorthand you can use

with someone who, by their very innate nature, simply gets

what you mean.)

The tone of ARVID‟s voice now changed into something

slightly friendlier, and obviously directed at me again. „Listen,

I‟m just one of the minor administrative automemes of the

Shipwide System, and I‟m supposed to give you some clue as

to what‟s happening before they send you in. You were

bought by the Angels a few months ago and stockpiled for

this one particular job, left in cold storage until they were

ready for you.‟ The face of symbols jiggled a bit in a way that

reminded me of those expressions people get when they

punctuate a speech with a little pause. „Now, personally, I‟d

have given you the run of the place and let you get your

bearings for weeks - but the Hetmen don‟t think like that. As

it is, I‟m supposed to just wind you up and let you go. And if

you don‟t there‟s people who are gonna make you, and kill

you if you don‟t. You got all that?‟

Now, I‟m quicker on the uptake than most, and I like to

think that I can do the poker face good enough for the full set

of fire irons. Basic human types, I‟ve noticed, really do need

to have things explained into the ground - need those weeks

wandering around that ARVID had mentioned - before they

get up to speed. But I‟d got the basic situation from the

moment I‟d been zapped, and revised my strategy - which

was to go along with this shit, hold it back with the witty

comebacks, and get the hell out the first chance I got.

So I shrugged unconcernedly. „I‟ve got it. So what is it I‟m

supposed to do?‟

„You‟ve been primed with most of the background already,‟

ARVID said. „This is just to fix it in your conscious mind...‟

My policy of holding it back with the witty comebacks was,

of course, subject to change. „Look, are you going to sodding

well tell me or what?‟ I said.

„All right,‟ said ARVID, „here‟s the skinny. The planet our

Ship‟s now orbiting is called Sharabeth, and it exists in a

state of fractured time.‟

„Fractured time?‟ I said, my being incredibly quick on the

uptake momentarily deserting me.

„Temporal physics,‟ said Kara. She started making

illustrative little movements with her hands. „The guys on the

science deck can give you the specifics, but, in general, it

seems that while we once thought the universe was travelling

through time at a second per second…‟

„It is, in fact,‟ cut in ARVID, ‘accelerating at a second per

second per second, falling towards some inconceivable end

that‟ll probably smash it like a collection of glass balls on a

rockcrete floor - reality being all balls, basically, in any case.‟

„And Sharabeth,‟ said Kara, shooting a murderous little

glance at the monitor unit, „seems to have hit something on

the way down. Sometime in the future, the science guys say,

maybe ten or twenty years from now. The shock and the

shards of it, however, are extending back as well as forwards

- and now it‟s hit our point on the subjective timeline.

Physically, it still looks and acts like a planet, but it‟s utterly

disrupted down there. All contact has been lost.‟

„Which wouldn‟t really matter,‟ said ARVID, „except that

Sharabeth was a nexus planet - post-galactic-contact, heavily

industrialized and commercialized, the focal incorporate

point for this entire galactic sector. There are contingency

plans to relocate these ties, of course, to some relatively

nearby planetary body like Dellah, say - but that‟s a last

resort. For the moment. this is a reconnaissance mission. We

need to find out what‟s happening on the Sharabeth surface

and what, if anything, can be salvaged.‟

„Well, good luck,‟ I said. „Sounds to me as if you really want

an investigator or one of these “science” guys. What the hell

has it got to do with me?‟

The Hetmen won‟t send in a human,‟ said Kara, sourly, and

I got the distinct impression that she was a bit contemptuous

about that. „Apparently the temporal stresses would rip their

poor little human minds apart.‟

„It‟ll to do with the fact of consciousness,‟ explained ARVID,

„and how it‟s linked to the fundamental nature of the

universe itself. It‟s what that mind believes on the deep

subconscious level that counts. We need to send in someone

who is as near to truly human as is possible, but

with a mind that‟s already dislocated in time - and that‟s you,

quite frankly, chum.‟

I mulled this over for a moment. That has got to be the

biggest crock of shit I‟ve ever heard - even if, as you say, I‟ve

only been awake and alive for ten minutes. You want

someone who‟s as near to human as dammit, so why don‟t

these Hetmen of yours take a human and brainwash

him so he thinks he came from another time.‟

The procedures to make that deep a change, in the limited

time we have available, would render the precise, uh, human

qualities we need unusable,‟ said ARVID, slightly glibly for

my taste.

And plus, you wouldn‟t catch the Hetmen doing something

like that to a human type,‟ said Kara. It seemed all this had

touched a nerve of resentment inside her slightly more than

somewhat.

„Well, OK,‟ I said to her. Then why not just send someone

like you in. I‟d think the Warrior Princess would be in her

element.‟

„Yeah, right,‟ said Kara. „Who do you think‟s gonna be

piloting you?‟

I never got to see what Sharabeth looked like from space, but

then again I never got to see the Oblivion Angels‟ Ship from

the outside, or even what the drop craft that was actually

going to drop me looked like. I feel a bit obscurely cheated

about that.

What I did get was Kara Delbane leading me through steel-

plate gangways to a vaguely egg-shaped polyceramic canister

cradled in some hydraulically controlled apparatus

resembling a massive claw. A pair of bored-looking

technicians installed me into power armour, wrapped me up

in crash webbing and sealed me into the canister.

„There‟s a two-way communicator by your ear,‟ the voice of

Kara said, naturally enough by my ear. „I‟ll keep in contact

with you until we hit the drop point. Don‟t worry about the

chutes opening and stuff, it‟s all automated.‟

I stared off miserably into the pitch dark. They could have

bothered to supply me with a light or something, even if all

I‟d have to see was a tangle of webbing.

The canister was gimballed up into the drop craft, the drop

craft blasted away from the Ship and began a spiralling,

suborbital descent towards what, in purely physical terms,

had once been the location of Sharabeth‟s major population

centre. The local name for it was „Wiglixix‟ or something, but,

so far as the broader interstellar community was concerned,

it was just basically still Sharabeth. And, if you‟re waiting for

a second-by-second account of every rattle, lurch, shake and

yawn of free fall in the course of all this, you‟re talking to the

wrong guy.

Kara and I just generally chatted, when she wasn‟t too

busy piloting the drop craft. I suppose we should have been

saying gritty and heroic things while we headed into

unknown peril, but instead she told me about how she liked

to collect recordings of early-twentieth-century musicals, which

she knew more about than I did, even though in one sense I

came from the nearer time.

Something, however, had been nagging at my mind. Not

wishing to be rude or anything,‟ I said into the two-way, „but

how the hell am I supposed to get out once I‟ve seen whatever

it is I‟m supposed to see?‟

„Don‟t worry about it,‟ said Kara cheerfully. The topography

boys have worked me out a vector. I‟m gonna ground this

thing behind you, after you drop, somewhere that looks

relatively safe. Then I‟m just gonna set up a defence shield

and wait for you to come to me. There‟s a little microtracer in

your skull that should tell me where you are.‟

„Do you know,‟ I said, „it‟s a wonder my head hasn‟t fallen

off, all this extra weight it‟s carrying. And why do I get the

distinct feeling I‟m the only one who‟s doing the actual work?‟

Kara snorted. „Hey, listen, if you want to come up here and

fly this thing through catastrophic metatemporal rifts that

could make us go kasplat like a frog with a straw up its arse,

you‟re quite, quite welcome to try it.‟

So when do we hit these metatemporal rifts?‟ I asked.

„We‟ve already gone through three. Just be glad you can‟t

see what I can through the canopy.‟

I tried and failed utterly to discern any internal change I

might have experienced in the process of going through

forces that, so ARVID had said, would have torn a normal

human mind to shreds. I was about to say as much, when

Kara cut in again: „We‟re in the lower stratosphere, now, drop

point coming up and - Oh shit, we‟ve got a bogey. Two bogeys.

Talk to you later…‟

For nearly thirty seconds I was thrown around like the

bearing in a shaken spraybomb, then Kara said, „It‟s no good.

They‟re still on our tail and closing. I‟m gonna have to lose

you, now.‟ There were a couple of clanging sounds from

outside, a whomph of acceleration that mashed my spine

against the shell, and then I was in free fall.

Almost instantly the concussion from some massive

detonation hit the canister and I tumbled.

„Oh shit...‟ I said. „Kara? What was that? Are you -‟

„Don‟t worry about it,‟ said her voice in my ear. „I ejected.‟

Her voice seemed harsh, the rasp of someone recovering from

exertion, fear and shock. „Hopefully, the little bits of landing

craft are gonna mask us on the way down. I really don‟t

wanna do that again, with nothing but a backup chute for

company.‟ I later learnt that she was in full sky-diving free

fall at this moment, the sound of the wind rushing past

masked by the helmet of her flight suit.

„So what do we do now, then?‟ I said. „Correct me if I‟m

wrong, but you were my lift out of here. What‟s the situation

now?‟

„The situation now,‟ said Kara, „is that we are completely

stuffed. For the moment you just sit tight. I can control my

descent and I‟ll stick close. Maybe we can work out what to

do when we‟re on the ground.‟

„Sounds fine by me,‟ I said.

And so we fell.

CHAPTER 3

Braxiatel smoothly put the drink he‟d been holding in my

hand, just like he‟d been waiting to do it on cue. I gulped it

down in one, through that sharp and sort of clicking pain

you get when you try to swallow at the same time as some

other, random, physical impulse tries to close your throat up

- the pain then spreading out into the upper chest and

sternum in that miserable, chronic way that‟s strangely

similar to a hefty smack in the groin but half a metre up.

Some detached little part of my mind noticed that, despite

the glass having been held in a hand for quite some time, the

liquid had still been freshly chilled. It was just a tiny

observation, without any sense of connection or emotion

either way.

„Look, I‟m sorry to simply drop it on you like that,‟ Bernice

Summerfield was saying, a little more back-pedal hurriedly

than I think she‟d meant, „but you had to know. I mean,

psychologically speaking, it‟s the best way to -‟

„Fuck your speaking psychologically,‟ I said, „and fuck you.‟

I walked over to the drinks cabinet, set the glass down and

turned back. „Appropriate emotions have been felt, responses

are now duly made, so let‟s talk business. I take it, from your

clumsy attempts before, that you were intending to offer me

an actual commission?‟

„Why, ah, yes. Yes, we were.‟ Braxiatel seemed momentarily

nonplussed for some reason.

„OK. My transputer systems should be back on line by now,

so have one of your secure negotiation packages contact it

and work something out. I want an unlimited, no-questions

expense fund keyed for my personal use, and a lump sum of

at least five hundred per cent over my “friend-to-stranger”

scale on termination of contract.

„Contract to be terminated upon undeniable physical proof

and/or my registered and express statement that all those

directly and actively involved in the death of Kara Delbane

have been located and neutralized, and that you -‟ this to

Braxiatel will indemnify me personally against any action,

civil or otherwise, brought against me as a result of my

pursuing said contract to its legitimate end.‟

I paused for breath and shrugged. „The transputers can

sort out the specifics, but those are the basics of what I want,

and if I don‟t go home to find them waiting for my chop then

all deals are off.‟ I gestured to the folder still in Braxiatel‟s

hand. „I‟m assuming that most of what I need to know is in

there, right?‟

„To a degree of factual certainty...‟

„Fine.‟ I pulled the folder out of his hand and headed out.

„I‟ll be in touch if I want any more.‟

At the polished mahogany double door I turned back to

look at Bernice Summerfield, who was still just standing

there and regarding me a little strangely, her expression

slightly vacant as though some unseen hand had temporarily

switched her off.

„Get a move on,‟ I told her. „Are you coming with me or not?‟

Box was indeed back on line when I arrived back in my

apartment with a still slightly dazed-seeming Bernice in tow.

„Everything‟s just tickety-boo with me,‟ it told me, not

knowing the specifics of who had set it on to diagnostics mid

hazarding the most reasonable guess. I didn‟t bother to

disabuse it - there was no point in blaming Box for something

I hadn‟t anticipated and wasn‟t its fault – and just made a

mental note to devise the core routines to stop it from ever

happening again.

„I think you should also have a deal for me,‟ I said.

„I‟ve got a deal,‟ said Box. „Party by the name of Braxiatel.‟

„Is it a good deal?‟

„It‟s the best I‟ve ever seen. Who‟ve you been blowing on

your nights off? I‟ll bet this guy has ran you ragged.‟

„Nobody in particular,‟ I said, reminding myself yet again to

add some supplementary interaction into Box for when I had

company. I scanned the specs as Box streamed them to me

over the monitor hanging from the ceiling. Braxiatel had

given me everything I‟d wanted, and then some. „Go for it.

Confirmed?‟

„It‟s confirmed,‟ said Box, without any sense of time lag that

might be noticeable to the human ear, and which I caught

only because I was listening for it. I have the unprovable

superstition that you can tell if somebody‟s listening in on

your transputer-based communications by the way the time

lag feels.

„OK,‟ I said. „Back up the files and then set up a security

field for us, will you? Active and across the board.‟ I watched

the visual readouts on the monitor hanging from the ceiling

as the lockouts fell in place: a globe of „hard‟ light unfolding

to encapsulate the apartment, strobing through various

levels of the electro- and gravmetic spectra on a random cycle

to disrupt any kind of eavesdropping sensor trained on it

Active disruption stands out like a sore thumb, of course -

anybody who might happen to be monitoring the activity

inside my apartment would realize I was on to them like a

shot – but at least it would mask what was actually

happening, inside the field, for a while.

Bernice was still standing by the door where I had left her,

still wearing that dazed and somewhat slack expression she‟d

had when we had left the chambers of Braxiatel. At the time

I‟d put it down to human-level startlement at my apparent

sudden change of emotional tack, but now I started to

wonder. I hadn‟t had any particular thing in mind myself

when I‟d simply assumed that she was going to come along

with me - it just seemed to fit the general dynamic of the

situation, if you get what I mean - but it occurred to me, now,

that she hadn‟t even questioned it, that she had simply done

what I‟d told her to do, when I‟d told her to do it, had

responded to my voice when I spoke, but had done so with

the automatic reflexes of someone on a kind of mental

autopilot. This was sufficiently unlike the Bernice

Summerfield I remembered that it was starting to worry me. I

peered into her blank, switched-off face, then took hold of her

shoulder and shook her. „Are you all right?‟

Benny snapped out of it with a shudder, glanced around

herself with brief puzzlement and then relaxed - I got the

impression that she had been desperately trying to work out

why she was suddenly here, had worked it out by cold logic

and was damned if she was going to admit to the extended

lapse of awareness that had led to her disorientation in the

first place.

„Sorry,‟ she said. „I was miles away for a moment. I‟m fine.

Why shouldn‟t I be fine?‟ She stalked over to my sofa with a

kind of spiky, controlled anger that seemed more directed at

herself than at me. „Shall we make a start?‟

The pink cardboard folder contained a mismatched

selection of papers, ranging from the hard-copy transcripts of

the sort I‟d encountered earlier, to sheets of what I recognized

as actual vellum due to temporally ambiguous aspects of my

nature, but which I‟d be surprised if people knew about these

days, covered with neat and calligraphic writing in what

looked suspiciously like dried blood without the platelets that

would make it clot instead of dry, but which I later learnt to

be cold tea. I skimmed through the papers as I pulled them

out, one by one, holding them up for Box‟s interface to scan

them before passing them to Bernice:

A SecServ™ preliminary report - that being the private

security concern who happened to find her, a neighbour in

Kara‟s warren who was under their wing having noticed an

„unsavoury character‟ coming and going and who had called

them out of sheer busybodiness. A uniformed operative had

been dispatched to show visible-presence willing, had

knocked on Kara‟s door to find it unlocked, and had

subsequently found her body in the bedroom. Probable cause

- pending the more extensive autopsy for which someone

would have to pay - asphyxiation.

Distribution of blood and free histamines in the body

placed the time of death at around thirty-six hours ago - just

after, it occurred to me, the last time I‟d seen her. And I

didn‟t need a diagram to work out who the „unsavoury

character‟ had been.

The body, when found, had been tied to the carbon-

composite reproduction of an old iron bedstead that Kara had

affected in life, wrists and ankles secured by lengths of fibre-

optic cable, each of an equal length, which seemed to have

been cut for the specific job. Somebody may have

miscalculated the forces and tensions slightly, because the

cabling had been supplemented by strips of torn and twisted

sheeting from the bed.

There were minor reflex and constrictive injuries on the

ankles and wrists themselves, as opposed to the multiple and

more extensive injuries that would have been caused by

someone consciously trying to work their wrists and ankles

out. There were bruises and contusions around the mouth

and neck and upper shoulders. There were a number of

localized burns - originally tagged as the work of a solder

probe, but heavily corrected by someone, who seemed to

know, as cigarette bums - on the inner thighs and along the

side of the left breast.

Clipped to the report, which had been copied in some weird

and slippery process like mimeography, were a couple of two-

dimensional stills, one showing an incredibly sappy-looking

Kara playing with one of the licensed-character toys she

tended to collect with a kind of gleeful irony, the other a still

from a SecServ™ helmet-cam of the body itself. Additionally,

there was a copy of the posted notice, saying how the body of

Delbane, K, would be held at the Grid Nine recycling plant for

seventy-two standard hours, should anyone feel the need to

collect it, and that Security Services SA (Prox.) would be more

than happy to investigate this suspicious death, at

reasonable rates.

The next item was one of those sheets of tea-written

vellum. I‟d tentatively pegged these as having been written by

Braxiatel himself, but, if so, it didn‟t exactly give a lot of

insight into the writer, being merely a condensed précis of

Kara‟s known life. Dates and facility codes of the APE process

that created her, dates and details of when she „broke‟ - that

being the point where an Artificial Person realizes what he or

she really is and becomes a real person rather than a thing, if

you get me, in the effective sense. Details of her work with

the Angels, the trip to Sharabeth, that sort of thing... I didn‟t

pay it much attention on account of how I pretty much knew

the details of it anyway.

Stapled to the sheet, though, was something slightly more

interesting. A printout from a standard and, on the face of it,

incredibly banal textmail, sent by Kara to a drop box, an

hour or so before she died:

It was wonderful to hear from you again, Lucy - and do

I have some news for you (!!) You remember when you

suggested I look up our old friend, and, well, I did, and

he was just *so* different from the way I remembered.

You know, one thing led to another - and I really think

he could be the one, you know? I‟ll drop by tomorrow

and we can have a proper talk about it. Until then,

though, remember what I said before about the colours

in the bathroom, I really think that green‟s the way to

go, and give my love to Benny...

I wasn‟t interested in the free-encoded information about

me, and far less in the plonking way that comes across when

you‟re trying to do something that sounds like girl talk rather

than just doing it. „This colours-in-the-bathroom code,‟ I said

to Bernice. „What does green mean on the scale?‟

Bernice raised an eyebrow. „I haven‟t the slightest Idea of

what you‟re talking about. It‟s not a code we‟ve used, when

we ever feel the need to use codes at all. I mean, Braxiatel‟s

my friend, but it‟s not as if we‟re part of some covert force of

conspiracy or anything like that. Sending something to Lucy,

on the other hand, means that someone‟s stumbled on

something relevant, but in a completely different area from

the one he or she‟s been sent to investigate, and needs to

come in and talk about it.‟

„Yeah, well,‟ I said. „That was going to be my next

suggestion.‟

„I‟m sure it was,‟ said Benny.

The final item was a sheaf of transcripts from the

monitoring, I assumed, that Braxiatel and his little friends

were keeping on Kara‟s place, in the same way as they

seemed to have kept it on my own. As had mine, transcripts

were written by way of an old typewriter, but the flow of them

seemed semiautomated in some idiosyncratic manner - I had

visions of a Remington hooked in some abstruse Heath

Robinson fashion to a phonograph with a horn:

--- GRID 40/45/9 - 5.1 ---

[2H19M NO SOUND]

DOOR OPENING, EXTERIOR (?): Y

VOICE (MALE): good thats very good [indistinguishable] gota

[?] green light yet

VOICE 2 (MALE): hang on hangon [?] yes thats it the cameras

and infrasensors are out yes but what about the audio

clamp mikes and inductance

VOICE 1: never fear such things shall be dealt with at the

appropriate

VOICE 2: you say so im just worrying yno f?] is this gon work

DOOR CLOSING (?): Y

VOICE 1: what going to work precisely

VOICE 2: yno [?] shes one of those ape things and they don‟t do

stuff like we do yno [?] is it gonna work an can she

even feeel [?] pain

VOICE 1: i can handle that particular side of things just

you concentrate upon using you nasty little talents as

required [indistinguishable] feel pain

DOOR OPENING, INTERIOR (?): Y

VOICE 1: now

DOOR CLOSING, INTERIOR (?): Y

[0H24M NO SOUND]

DOOR OPENING, INTERIOR (?): Y

VOICE 2: [*expletive*]

VOICE 1: [*expletive*] indeed well it seems our little trip

amongst the lower classes has been in vane

VOICE 2: so what do we do now

VOICE 1: retrace her footsteps of course either she simply didn‟t

know she had the item on her or shes blocked it off in some

way but either way the little f *expletive* racial derog.] ape

doesnt ha

(0HI2MNO SOUND]

GLOBAL POSITIONING DEVICE (?): N

DEFINE (?): COMMUNICATIONS UNIT ALERT,

INDIVIDUALIZED

DEFINITION PRESENT. ADD TO DEFINITION

PARAMETERS (?): Y

FX: „click‟

FX: click‟

|4H27M NO SOUND]

* * *

--- GRID 40/45/9 - 5.2 ---

DOOR OPENING, INTERIOR (?): Y

VOICE (MALE): now

DOOR CLOSING, INTERIOR (?): Y

VOICE: what do we have here i think we

ZIP FASTENER (?): N

DEFINE (?): CLOTH TEARING

STORED

VOICE 2 (FEMALE): mn I?] [indistinguishable] wha [?JVOICE 3:

cmn [?] |*expletive*] tie those l*expletive*J

sheets

COMPLEX COMPOSITE BREAKDOWN (?): N

FX: „slap‟

VOICE 3: [*expletive*] still [*expletive*]

VOICE 1: and thank [*expletive*] for that as it were tie her feet

two we dont want any more unfortunate occurrences do

we

CLOTH TEARING (?): Y

VOICE I: now wake her up

VOICE 2: [indistinguishable]

VOICE 1: hallo kara [?] remember me

VOICE 2: [indistinguishable]

VOICE 1: hit her

FX: „slap‟

VOICE 1: where is it kara [?]

VOICE 2: [*expletive*]

VOICE 1: now im going to let that go for the moment kara [?]

because underneath it all i am a remarkably civilized

and tolerant man where is it kara [?]

VOICE 2: [indistinguishable] what

VOICE 1: again

FX: „slap‟

VOICE 1: where it it kara [?]

VOICE 2: wheres what

*NO NEAR REFERENCE* (?): IGNITING OF

SULPHUR MATCH

STORED

*NO NEAR REFERENCE* (?): LIGHTING OF

CIGARINO

STORED

VOICE 1: where is it kara [?]

VOICE 2: wheres what

VOICE 3: where it it [*expletive»]

VOICE 2: where whu [?] [indistinguishable]

And that was it. „Shit!‟ I threw the sheet of transcript away

from me with such force of anger that it was a bit

disheartening to see it catch the air wrong and flutter

wonkily to the ground a bare metre away. I searched through

the pink-card folder, just in case I‟d missed anything left in

it, and then pulled it apart at the joins just to be sure. „A

whole section‟s been lifted from the end. Either your friend

Braxiatel has been incredibly sloppy in his typing, or you

people have been got at more than you thought.‟

„Maybe there was nothing useful to be learnt from it,‟

Bernice said, looking at me with that weird little look of

concern again. „Maybe it wasn‟t included to spare the

sensibilities.‟

„Well, the thoughtful little dear.‟ I snorted. „How frightfully

considerate. Please pardon me if I‟d have liked the chance to

decide what my delicate sensibilities could take or not for

myself. Oh well. Other than that, conclusions, anybody?‟

„The people swore a lot,‟ said Box from the ceiling monitor.

„Ho bleeding ho. Any conclusions other than that?‟

„Well, I read through the file before I came to pick you up.‟

said Bernice, „and my basic conclusions haven‟t changed.‟

She counted off the obvious on her fingers: „There were two

assailants; they were looking for some particular item and

they didn‟t find it. They have contacts within myself and

Irving‟s associates, close enough that they were aware Kara‟s

apartment was being monitored - and they were good

enough, technically, to do something about it to a certain

extent. This worked well enough, for long enough, to let them

get away with questioning, torturing and killing her - if we‟d

been actively monitoring events, those transcripts would

detail two people breaking in and a jolly exciting rescue. All of

this,‟ she concluded, „may or may not be tied up with the

textmail she sent to Braxiatel, saying how she wanted to

come in and talk.‟

„Why do I get the feeling,‟ I said, „that you wouldn‟t admit

you‟d crapped in your hat without solid evidence and stills of

it from three sides?‟

Bernice shrugged. „Data stills can be edited and I don‟t

wear hats.‟

I climbed off the sofa and picked up the sheet of transcript

I‟d thrown away in pique. „I notice that, after the assailants

left, somebody called. I‟m assuming that call didn‟t come

from somebody on your end.‟

Bernice shook her head. „Not that I‟m aware of.‟

„OK. It‟s worth checking out. The Security Services guys are

gonna keep the crime scene intact, more or less, for their

window-of-retainer, so we can check that out tomorrow.‟

„Tomorrow?‟ Bernice said. „I really think we should start

tonight. It‟s not as if we have a lot of time with which to play

about.‟

„This isn‟t combat, Bernice,‟ I said. „It‟s an investigation.

Something‟s going on and it has a deadline – but, deadline or

not, we haven‟t got a hope in hell of stopping it until we work

out what the hell it is. For that we need to be sharp.‟ I looked

into her eyes, letting her know I could see the bloodshot,

utter sense of exhaustion that she was barely holding back.

„It‟s late, I‟ve had a hard day and I‟m shattered. You‟re

probably feeling none too fresh. We both of us need to catch

a few hours‟ sleep before we do thing one.‟

„Well, all right,‟ Bernice said dubiously - and I got the

impression she was caught in that point of desperately trying

to push herself, but privately relieved that somebody had

given her an excuse to give up and go limp for a while. It

hadn‟t been what she wanted to do, after all. „All right. But

just for a few hours.‟

„Then it‟s settled. Spare room‟s over there. Anything to add

before we turn in for a bit. Box? Might as well put all those

expensive new volatile processor bubbles to some use.‟

„Just an observation,‟ said Box. „It can‟t be dignified with

the word conclusion, because it‟s so obvious. Kara Delbane

was an Artificial Personality Embodiment, with the kind of

biological modifications broadly similar to yourself.‟

„This is true,‟ I said. „Your point being?‟

I lie point being, what‟s one of the few things in this galaxy

that are human-shaped and can restrain an awake and

fiercely struggling Artificial Personality Embodiment?‟

Now, you, reading this, will have seen that coming a mile

off, and wonder how anybody could be so inexpressibly dumb

not to see it instantly. All I can say in my defence is that I‟d

had a trying day, and I was too close to the subject in

general, on any number of levels, so it was one of those

woods-for-the-trees things. I simply hadn‟t got it,

consciously, in the same way as the punchline to a joke is

obvious after you know, until now.

„You‟re right. Box,‟ I said. „It is obvious. Kara was killed by

another APE.‟

I hadn‟t been entirely honest with Bernice about being

tired, in the physical sense at least. With my enhancements,

physically, I can go without sleep for a month. But there are

other kinds of fatigue, other kinds of sleep we need. I left

Bernice to her own devices and went into my bedroom,

carefully triple-locked the door and finally let go of the

control I had been keeping clenched around me like a

tungsten band ever since Braxiatel‟s chambers, where Kara

had suddenly become dead.

Now, it‟s not my place here to go into the particulars of the

grieving process in all its interminable and miserable glory,

but there were one or two things that surfaced from the

chaos of rage and anguish and loss, to be recognized and

dealt with by the diamond-hard thread of detachment

running through it, that I feel I have to mention in the

interests of basic context.

The first was the deep emotional-level impulse to think of

Bernice, and Braxiatel for that matter, as the murderers, on

account of how it was through them I learnt of the murder in

the first place. I‟d clamped down massively on it at the time,

of course, and gone into business mode like was on

automatic pilot. I couldn‟t leave it like that, though - it was

just the thing to come out at a crucial moment and have me

making some unconscious mistake that would have Bernice,

Braxiatel and probably myself killed into the bargain.

So I let it out for a while. Fortunately, it wasn‟t the sort of

mental state that coped very well with three rather complex

locks, or I think I would have hunted Bernice through the

house and torn her limb from limb. The thread of detached

consciousness - I can‟t in all honesty call it me, it‟s just the

bit I like to think of as me - let it run around for a while

before bringing it to heel, like a trainer taming some feral

dog, by effectively telling it to stop acting like a bloody idiot

and pull itself together.

The next impulse to be dealt with was that old chestnut

about blaming the victim for leaving you like this – the sort of

state where you could quite happily murder them yourself for

doing it. I diverted that fury on to a kind of mentally

constructed animus, a kind of bog-archetypical Murdering

Villain like you‟d find in the holomovies based on Box‟s

comment that Kara had been killed by an APE. This was the

real Bad Guy here, and I focused all the rage I felt upon a

kind of revenge fantasy concerning Him. The details aren‟t

important, save that I wouldn‟t have liked to meet the guy

down some dark alley in real life - and you wouldn‟t like to

see what I imagined doing to him on a full stomach, or even a

glass of oogli juice and a croissant.

It was at that point that the detached superegoistical

thread pointed out, in reasonable terms, that life was rarely

like the holomovies. It was highly unlikely that the party or

parties behind the death of Kara Delbane would, in fact, boil

down to turning a ten-foot-tall and cybernetically

human/arachnid hybrid into steak-and-arthropod puree.

The- death of Kara Delbane was tied up with a mystery, and,

if one was to bring summary justice to its instigators, one

might be in with a better chance if one actually solved it.

Fair enough, said the part of me that thirsted for revenge,

I‟ll just go out there and...

Beating up everybody who so much as looks at you in a

suspicious way, like some third-rate lead in a holomovie

pulp, said the superego, is just going to get you pulled down

and shot by Security Services and every other faction out

there, let alone the people who murdered Kara. If you want to

do this then you‟ll have to do it to the full extent of the skills

at your command.

Well OK, yeah, if you put it that way...

And furthermore, said the superego, while you entered into

a contract with Braxiatel with quite specific terms, remember

that there are larger factors operating, more at stake than

personal revenge. If you find yourself with a choice between

putting one over the other, I‟d suggest you...

I was of the opinion, on this point, that the superego could

piss right off.

All right, I will, said the superego.

I came out of the fugue in the kind of still slightly

disassociated state that had me wondering, briefly, what kind

of bomb had hit the room. I can‟t imagine that anybody else

would be interested to learn that I once owned a lava lamp, a

Rickenbacker semiacoustic guitar, a Nob lamp with

documentation that proved it was a genuine twentieth-

century Ikea, a William Morris wall drape and so forth.

Suffice it to say that my nature gives me a taste for a certain

kind of horrendously expensive antique, and in my state of

mindless rage I had smashed, broken and torn it all apart.

My hands and forearms were bruised and bleeding and I had

lost a couple of fingernails even with my bioenhancements it

would take a week or so to grow them back.

The anguish that had threatened to tear me apart, though,

had gone, leaving behind it a kind of cold hole that I could

feel the edges of and which, I knew, was never really going to

close. There was a stillness inside, a calm that let me

remember Kara properly. How we had met and the time we

had spent in the Oblivion Angels. The chance meetings

afterwards and the abortive attempt at living together in Aeon

Flux on Mars: two weeks of shagging so constant that the

entire sub-warren complained, followed by an icy crust of

indifference that neither of us wanted to break because we

both knew what that meant. Meeting up again here, quite by

chance, and talking, and meeting again, and the slow

building up of something inside that seemed so natural and

right that as the tendrils of connection bound us closer

together we knew where things were going without using the

words. The tiny lines that quirked up at the corner of her

mouth. The way she shivered when you touched a certain

point on the back of her thigh. Her hair.

These images wandered by me with a kind of very quiet

clarity. They were happy and alive, so I decided to leave my

body where it was on the floor curled up and with the face

and mouth working, and gave myself up to them.

BACKGROUND 3

The sky was just this kind of formless, boiling, multi-

coloured mass - the result of atmospheric gases and various

suspended

pollutants

reacting

against

the

inter-

dimensionally disruptive forces of this place rather than

those forces themselves. It‟s impossible for us to actually see

time as we accelerate through it, or rebound wildly off in

some other direction entirely: we just see the secondary

effects.

On the ground there was nothing but ruins and rubble,

packed with the ragged forms that were the final remains of a

populated, crowded city after some final and devastating

catastrophe. There was a kind of stillness here, not even a

breeze - the only sound that of the shrieking sky, washed out

and distant, like a radio receiver badly tuned to some

broadcast with the volume cranked down low.

The drop capsule had gone through the process of

deploying its various chutes, hit the ground and split open. A

little speaker unit had then informed me that there were

weapons and other useful items hidden in the lining - I

guessed that this was because the Oblivion Angels were wary

of telling me about weapons and other useful items when I

was actually on the ship, and could use them to create

enough problems to maybe escape. Kara was currently

hanging off the carbon-compound superstructure of a

wrecked building and hunting around with one useful item, a

little binaural subsonar-bounce rig. Fortunately, whatever

else was happening to the atmosphere, it didn‟t seem to stop

such signals from bouncing off its inside edge.

There‟s a big structure over the skyline,‟ she said,

clambering down, the helmet of her suit clattering on the

clips where she had fixed it to her belt, her boots crunching

in something vaguely calcific that I was trying not to think

about at this point. „Nothing else of the size showing up.‟

That‟s something to head for, anyway,‟ I said. „Whatever, I

don‟t think we should be hanging around here. We were shot

down. Somebody‟s taking an active interest, and I don‟t want

to be around when they come looking for us.‟

Now, listen: the name Sharabeth has nowadays become

one of those watchwords for evil, like Belsen or the Golgotha

Skull Maze. You‟ve seen the footage and the stills, whoever

you are, the grave pits frothing with a mulch of decomposing

matter, the twisted strings of dehydrated offal hanging

through the ruined streets, the little tableaux of fire-

blackened bones. You probably think you can get a handle

on the true horror of the place, but I was there, and I‟m here

to tell you that you can‟t. You just can’t.

I don‟t want to talk about it much. What I will say, though,

is that it‟s tied up with the fact that it wasn‟t the result of a

single event like a bomb blast or something. All these ruins,

all this death had been created on a piecemeal basis.

Someone or something had done something to these people,

then done it again, and yet again, so that every step you took

and every corner you turned presented you with some new

bit of inexpressibly abhorrent inventiveness.

The reactions to it built up in you cumulatively – and after

a few kilometres I couldn‟t stand any more. I stumbled over a

pile of debris, stuck my head through the window of what, I

suppose, had once been a storefront in a structure broken off

like a rotted tooth, and vomited copiously. I‟m just an old

softy at heart, basically.

In some detached part of my mind, I wondered at the fact

that there was something to throw up in the first place, what

with only having been unpacked for a few hours and all, and

not having eaten in that time. I later learnt that I‟d been

decanted with a stomach full of a kind of long-life bulking

nutrient mush that was the APE equivalent of packing some

item of electrical equipment in expanded polystyrene beads.

All I can say is, if the taste of it coming up was any

indication, I‟m glad I wasn‟t self-aware when it was going

down.

I became aware of a hand on my shoulder. I tried to flinch

away, and felt the cold burn of a hypoderm on my neck.

„It‟s just a blocker,‟ Kara said. „Help you to function without

it hitting you so deep.‟

I don‟t know if the hypo did any real good, but at least I

stopped dry-heaving. I turned to see that Kara was

administering a similar shot to herself. There were bruised-

looking little trauma circles around her eyes and, without

knowing what I was looking like myself, I got the feeling that

she‟d been hit even harder by all this than I. We held each

other until we‟d stopped shaking – nothing Iffy involved, you

understand: just for the simple feel of something that was

there and alive. At the point where we were climbing to our

feet to press on, though, I heard a sound that told me there

was something else alive, here. And so there was - at least, in

a sense. It sounded mechanical.

Kara didn‟t appear to have heard it. I slapped her down

under the lee of the debris I‟d so recently clambered over to

give us a bit of cover. She started to struggle about thinking

the gods alone know what - and then she heard it, too, and

was still. The sound grew louder, then louder still, and then

one of the most innately ridiculous if not actively insane

things I‟ve ever seen in my life lurched into the ruined street.

It seemed to be nothing but a mass of whirling pistons and

ball joints and greasy smoke on caterpillar treads. From

somewhere inside the smoke I could make out a huge

copper-and-verdigris boiler and an exhaust chimney, but I

couldn‟t make out any overall, distinctive shape. Possibly, it

was constructed under physical laws slightly different from

those I thought I knew, but, in any event, I couldn‟t quite

seem to get a fix on it with my eyes.

What I did see, though, was that it was coming to a stop. I

pulled the gun I had salvaged from the capsule lining - a big,

multifunctional thing that seemed to fit my hand perfectly

and which, I knew, I knew how to use without consciously

thinking about it. Either those Catan info-implants again, or

I had a little customizable weapons-recognition slot

somewhere that the Angels had obligingly filled. By my side, I

was aware without looking, Kara had produced a similar

weapon from her suit.

The contraption came to a gear-spinning stop and blew its

stack. Figures spilt from it, monstrous figures, each roughly

the size of a man. Indeed, each seemed to have been warped

from a basically human base, but it was as though some

other hand had played with them like plasticine, pulling and

twisting them into grotesque shapes, The eyes in their

misshapen faces burnt redly, like laser sights. These

basically human monsters cast about themselves, seemingly

mindless and at random. One of them, however, carried an

archaic-looking wooden box with a circular grille in the front,

and seemed to be casting about more purposefully. The box

tracked around, and ended up pointing directly towards Kara

and me. The basically human monster shouted something

out in a glutinous and shrittering voice which my translators

couldn‟t handle - and the rest of them boiled towards us at a

run.

Like I‟ve said, I‟m not entirely slow on the uptake. I took

down several of the basically human creatures in a variety of

entertaining multifunctional ways, and Kara followed suit.

What with the fact that she‟d actually fired a gun before, and

for all my Think-Tank memories I actually hadn‟t, I think she

took down more than I did.

It didn‟t do any good. I have no idea how it was possible to

pack that many basically human monsters into an insane

steam-driven contraption, but there didn‟t seem to be any

end to them. The last thing I remember before plunging into

the fever-dark was an elongated, spurlike, basically human

fingernail slashing for me as they overran us.

I woke to find myself hanging in a wire cage, suspended over

the globular copper boiler of the vehicle. It didn‟t look any

better or comprehensible from this angle and, quite apart

from that, my feelings about the world in general were not

improved by finding that I was now completely naked. My

skin was sizzling gently on the wire. In a kind of slow-fry way,

in the transferred heat. There was a puncture wound in my

side, and if I started fingering it to see how deep it was I‟d

only make it worse, but it didn‟t seem too bad.

Kara was there with me, and naked as I was, but she

hadn‟t been so lucky. She was still out for the count. There

was a deep gash across her ribcage and some basically

human thing had bitten a large chunk out of her arm. The

wounds were clotting, but she appeared to have lost a lot of

blood. I lifted her up in my arms, tried to keep as much of

her body as possible away from the hot wire of the cage, and

tried to get my bearings through the miasma of smoke.

A form resolved out of it, ahead of us, where we were

presumably being taken. I judged that we were close now to

the structure Kara had picked up on the sonar - about a

thousand kilometres too close.

There are things that are big, and are built that way

because they‟re big things. Then there are things that are big

because they‟ve been built up out of other things - and this

particular thing was vast. It had been cannibalized from the

materials of the surrounding city, the piled-together

complexity of it seeming to draw the eye and rivet it. If you

imagined some malevolent ogre-spawn, in the truly vicious

way that children have, tearing an ant-sized city apart and

using it to build a house as though out of playbricks, you‟ll

get the general idea. In the shifting, tortured light from the

sky above, it seemed to have been coated and crusted with

dried blood. It might have been my pure imagination, but to

this day I‟ll swear that it emitted this kind of soundless,

disembodied scream, like it was somehow the repository for

every soul on Sharabeth who had died.

As the contrivance churned and lurched towards the

structure, I saw that across the face, picked out in materials

of a lighter hue than those around them, were some words

that from this angle seemed to have been scrawled across the

edifice in a childish hand.

The words read: SLEEd iNCOPRORATeD.

SUPPLEMENTARY EXTRACT

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield:

After [section deliberately defaced on source] had gone to bed,

I just basically wandered around the apartment for a while,

looking at the furnishings and ornamentation, generally

trying to get a handle on his mind:

The vinyl-covered sofa we had sat on while poring through

the file, big enough for someone to sprawl out sybaritically if

one so desired. A selection of lithographic prints on the wall,

under glass and cleanly framed: Duchamp, Miro, Robert

Crumb from his Eggs Ackley period, a couple of technically

proficient and quite moving photomontages which I think

[section defaced on source] had made himself. A yellow-

painted steel filing cabinet An unconnected Bakelite

candlestick telephone... I tried to work out if [name defaced

from source] just had an eclectic love of antiques, or if he was

unconsciously trying to re-create the surroundings of what to

him was his childhood, constantly thwarted by the

unavailability and expense of the objects in question or his

inability to recollect the precise details.

„The spare bedroom‟s just on your left,‟ the AI unit, Box,

said, rather pointedly, after a few minutes.

„That‟s fine,‟ I replied. „I‟m just going in there now. Peek-a-

boo.‟

Box might have been pushing the AI envelope so fat - in so

far as AI technology was available to private citizens, in this

time and place - that the stamp fell off, but it was no match

for technology and methods that were not, in the precise

sense, from this place and time. When I‟d disabled it the first

time, so I could wait for [section defaced on source]

unobserved, I‟d taken the opportunity to introduce a one-

shot transputronic polyfractal virus analogue, keyed to a

trigger word. At the mention of it (the word itself wasn‟t

significant, I‟d just remembered it from somewhere as the

last word anyone would think of) Box‟s interface shut down,

it reversed its real-time counter and experienced a sensor-

construct of me going into [section defaced on source] spare

room, climbing under the duvet, writing in my diary and then

falling slightly fitfully to sleep.

I now had around forty-five standard minutes before I‟d

register on the sensors again. I went into the spare room

anyway, pulled off my clothes and got into bed, just to be on

the safe side. In the pocket of the shorts I‟d been wearing

under the Suit of Lights™ was a small translucent cube of a

substance resembling jade. I pressed the faces in a certain

manner and order, and it kindled itself to life: a

communications device, several centuries more advanced

than anything the Proximan Chain had to offer, its interfaces

ramped down to connect to the local network via an

effectively untraceable link - the technology that might trace

it not having even been invented.

My first call was to the man who had given the cube to me

in the first place.

„It‟s me, Benny,‟ I said as Irving Braxiatel‟s face unfolded in

a haze of ionized air particles, instantly, without any lag that

comes from normal people getting out of the bath, or out of

bed, or off the toilet to answer the phone. Just another one of

those little, subtly wrong things about him that tend to

disconcert the mind on some level.

I noticed that I‟d identified myself verbally, when he could

see perfectly well who I was without being told - and that was

one of those redundant hangovers from the days before

communicators had visuals, which people still do without

thinking and which hang around like the cultural equivalent

of an appendix. It wasn‟t a big thing, md I don‟t want to make

a big thing about it; it was simply one of those things you

notice for the first time and then wonder how you couldn‟t

have before.

That‟s the effect Irving Braxiatel has on you. He isn‟t

human, much as he affects the form and manner of a human

being. If you spend much time in his company, you realize

that he operates upon completely different levels - and that

focuses your own mind back on your own. The proof of this,

dear diary, lies in how I‟ve just spent two and a half

paragraphs detailing every little thing that went through my

mind on the basis of his answering the bloody phone.

„And what are your opinions?‟ he asked without preamble.

„Do you think it‟s possible that [section defaced on source]

killed her or not?‟

„I don‟t know,‟ I said. „I was watching his face when I told

him, and the shock and reaction, denial and acceptance were

psychologically correct and seemed genuine, if incredibly

accelerated. But I honestly don‟t know.‟ I made that little

hand-shrugging gesture for the screen, which has only

comparatively recently started to occur but which is already

beginning to supplant those vestigial audio-phone manners I

talked of earlier. „I know that people like him are still people,

and [section defaced on source] identity is so advanced as to

be precisely that of a human - but the fact remains that their

physical brain processes don‟t work in quite the same way.

There‟s a level of control in there that we‟ll never be able to

experience or understand.‟

„Speak for yourself,‟ said Braxiatel, with a slightly and

sardonically raised eyebrow. „And then some.‟

„My point being,‟ I said, a little coolly, „that he‟s quite

capable of faking those reactions so well that a human of

even my renowned astuteness couldn‟t tell the difference.

Rather like dealing with you, sometimes, as it happens.‟

„Quite.‟ Irving chuckled mildly. „And as for myself, of

course, not being able to notice certain human minutiae if

my life depended on it - as you‟ve told me upon numerous

occasions - it leaves me doubly in the dark.‟

„I‟d have thought it would have given you a clearer picture

of what he was thinking than I -‟

„A lemon is no more human than a three-toed sloth,‟ said

Braxiatel, „but I doubt you‟d ask it what the three-toed sloth

was thinking.‟

„Be that as it may,‟ I said, „I‟d like to bring in a specialist to

help. Would that be all right?‟

„I trust your judgement completely. If it‟s possible, though,

I‟d like you to come in tomorrow for a posthypnotic briefing.

Everything you‟ve seen of him and his environment, the

subconscious connections that you might have made but

might not consciously know, that sort of thing.‟

„I can do that,‟ I said. „I came here without a change of

clothes, so I‟ve got an excuse to come back. Can you have a

bag ready for me?‟

Irving smiled. „I‟m certain that can be arranged.‟

„And, when you do, please have somebody human pack it

for me - I can‟t stress that enough, Brax. I don‟t want to end

up running around the Proximan Chain in a pair of spandex

jogging shorts, rubber flip-flops and a wimple.‟

„You have my word on it.‟ Irving started to do that little

motion someone does to turn away and break the connection,

then turned back as if remembering something. „And Bernice,

be careful. The man is potentially lethal, whether he in in fact

killed Kara Delbane or not. Treat him with extreme caution.‟

He frowned. „You‟re not looking well, Bernice.‟

„I‟m still on top of it,‟ I told him. „It‟s not going to be a

problem.‟

„Just don‟t let it cloud your judgement,‟ said Braxiatel.

After I had broken the connection with Brax, I sat and had

a bit of a think. The suggestion from [section defaced on

source] that security had been compromised hadn‟t rung any

internal alarm bells, precisely, but it had me wondering.

[Section defaced on source] thought of me in terms of working

for some cloak-and-dagger organization that might be

infiltrated, and, while the truth of matters was nothing like

that, it was true that I didn‟t really know or trust that many

of the people I was currently working with at Irving

Braxiatel‟s request. I don‟t mean that as a slight against

Artificial Personality Embodiments, who I know have over the

past few years become targets for that mindless lynch-mob

mentality of bigotry that seems to be endemic to humans of a

certain type, but - Oh bugger, I‟ve just remembered what

[section defaced on source] said about it having to be an APE

that murdered Kara. Something to think about a bit later.

Anyway, I tried to think of people who were active in the

Proximan Chain, who could give me what I needed, who I

personally knew and trusted - and in the end there was only

one choice. I set the jade cube to produce a virtual dialler (yet

another semantic cultural appendix, yes, I know - stop the

going off on stupid bleeding tangents, Benny!) and punched

in the code. I could only hope they were in.

This time there was some wait before the call was

answered. Eventually, a sleep-mussed-looking, foxy female

face blinked at me from the subatomically vibrating ether:

„Dead Dog in the Water Preproductions. How can I - oh.‟ The

face fell momentarily and then glared at me with barely

restrained hostility. „It‟s you.‟

I have to confess to being puzzled, sometimes. I know that

she shares some deep and incredibly important bond with

him, but I know for a cold hard fact, for various reasons, that

it isn‟t the immediately obvious. It‟s a bit like those nonsense

riddles of Carroll, or a Zen koan: the mind keeps churning

around and around, desperately trying to find some clue to

an answer that simply isn‟t there, and that hurts in a kind of

low-grade, back-of-the-mind way that never goes away.

„Hello...‟ I began.

„Whatever it is, you‟re not going to talk to him,‟ she said,

shortly. „And I mean whatever it is, you‟re not getting

through. You don‟t know how much you hurt him when you

went away again, and I‟m not going to let you do that to him

again.‟

There was something of the voice of a child running

towards some oncoming freight train, determined to beat it

back with her fists before it hit someone it loved on the track,

somewhere back down the line, and...

[The following section of the source is covered by an adhesive

yellow note, the writing in the same hand but with signifiers

showing a different and ambiguous mental and emotional

state. It reads:

‘I told her simply that I did not need to talk to J, and that I

needed her help tomorrow for something that might turn out to

be very important. She was only too happy to agree.’]

...forty-five minutes of privacy are almost up, now. Judging

how long calls are going to take, before you make them, is

incredibly difficult, but I erred on the side of generosity just

to be on the safe side. I‟ve spent the rest of the time getting

this down - and, yet again, I‟ve put this down in all its

tedious circumstantiality to be safe. You never know what

you‟ll never remember when you wake up.

The blanks are getting worse. The one today really worried

me: closing my eyes and opening them again to find myself

somewhere completely else. The thing inside me has kindly

given me several months in which to set my affairs in order -

and here I am, several months later, living on the dregs of

borrowed time.

So, quickly now, here at the end, again. Just to be on the

safe side, just in case.

Just to be safe.

You are Bernice Summerfield and you like to be called

Benny. You are a fully qualified archaeologist, whatever

anyone says, and you have written a book about it. You can

be really clever and funny and you have friends who love you

- remember that, wherever you find yourself, you‟re far more

likely to find yourself with human and alien and other kinds

of people who want to help you rather than hurt you, whether

you know them or not, because in the end, wherever you find

yourself, people are fundamentally decent wherever you find

them. Believe that and, if you have the choice, try to live like

that above all else.

You have a husband and a father and several really special

friends and you have done great and good and marvellous

things. There once was someone so important to you that he

was your

I think he

can‟t

You have a condition of the brain, similar to Alzheimer‟s,

and probably the result of a backstreet mind-altering

process, called a Mary-Sue, which you had done some

months ago - a disease that exhibits certain signs of being

alive, in the cohesive sense, as opposed to the purely

mindless operation of bacteria and viruses, but in the end

remains unclassifiable and, ultimately, incurable.

All you really need to know is that it‟s eating into your

mind, proliferating through it with quasi-viral tendrils,

preparing to go symptomatic and overt - and, when it does, it

will eat your mind and your memories out from the inside,

everything that makes you what you are. One of these days

you‟re simply going to wake up and not know who you are, and

you only have a little time left, now, to decide what you want

to

[extract ends abruptly]

BACKGROUND 4

The steam-driven contraption drove through dark and slimy

tunnels, streams of water spattering through the cage to

make the wire sizzle, and then to hit the boiler and evaporate

with a spattering hiss. I caught some in my mouth - realizing

that the crawling physical need I‟d felt Inside me for a while

now was thirst. The gods only know what contaminants I

ingested along with it, but I‟ve never tasted something so

inexpressibly wonderful, before or since.

As we rattled through the intestines of this „Sleed

Incorporation‟, however, the physical smell of death,

concentrated several factors over and above what I‟d

experienced in the city outside, became too much and I threw

all the water I‟d drunk up again. People who don‟t know

think that the phrase „the smell of death‟ is merely figurative,

but I‟m here to tell you that just ain‟t so.

The contraption emerged from the tunnels into a large,

mismatched-brick-walled chamber lit by banks of flood-

lights. Some of them had blown, and the general erratic

buzzing of those that survived gave me the impression that

these lights had been switched off and left unused for some

while, only to be switched on again for this special occasion.

The cage was lowered on a ratcheted device and we were

hauled out. A number of basically human creatures held me

down while others dragged the still unconscious Kara into a

brass elevator cage, which than rose jerkily out of sight on a

line. Whatever was going to happen to Kara, I surmised, it

wasn‟t going to happen to me.

The basically human creatures pulled me to my feet and

dragged me from the chamber and through a network of foot

tunnels, sporadically lighted by feebly glowing biofluorescent

strips. In a kind of cubicle, walled with white tiles that

seemed to be a parody of the idea of „sterile conditions‟, they

shaved my hair (which growl only a few millimetres in any

case, and then stops dead) with rusting blades that pulled

some serious lumps of flesh out of my scalp.

And then they skinned me, flayed me alive. I don‟t really

want to talk about that, much. The techniques themselves

were strangely sophisticated, though, and strangely precise:

they even managed to do it to things like my scrotum and my

face.

A slimy hood of some kind (I never learnt quite what it was,

but I have the horrible suspicion it was made out of some of

the removed bits of me) was pulled over my face, and the

basically human creatures dragged me off again. After a dark

and seemingly endless journey, I was shoved into what I later

learnt through touch to be a lightless cell with old, dried shit

smeared on the walls. A steel-plate door was shut behind me

and I was left alone. I never did learn just what function,

precisely, the skinning of me was supposed to serve.

I was left alone, so far as I can judge, for about

seventy-two standard hours. I can‟t be sure, as my still

basically human thought processes and those of an

accelerated APE operated on different response-time scales,

and without some external factor with which to compare

them it was impossible to tell which, if either, was right. In

any event, I was left alone for more than enough time to come

up with some interesting personal theories about the relative

and comparative values of roundabouts and swings.

On the plus side of things, my enhanced repair factors

wore kicking in like nobody‟s business and just as

advertised. I could feel the damage healing by the minute. On

the minus side, accelerated biological processes in the

current conditions were a bit of a mixed blessing, to put it

mildly. You could have boiled a pot of ice-water on my head

and I seemed to be positively spraying septicaemic pus. All

part of life‟s rich tapestry and stuff, basically.

At indeterminate length, the basically human creatures

came for me again. They took me to another room In which

there was a notched, stained table, behind which sat two

figures. Despite the specifics of their physical deformity, the

basically human creatures had seemed more or less

indistinguishable and interchangeable as any worker insect

in a hive. These new people were slightly different, retaining

their human form to some extent but twisted into what

looked like unpleasant-minded caricatures. Both were

diseased, encrusted with filth and other, even less palatable,

matter. One was gangling and twitchy, wearing a once-white

smock with scalpels and the suchlike in the breast pocket

and, from what I could make out, much as I didn‟t want to,

nothing else. The other was corpulent and sluglike, dressed

in the remains of an archaic-looking pinstripe business suit,

of the sort that has me thinking, now, of those old Soviet

cartoons of Capitalist Pigs who should be put up against the

wall and shot. They were like parody images made flesh,

without quite enough thought from whoever had made them

as to the physical practicalities of it, and in my mind I

instantly tagged them as the Surgeon and the Manager.

While the basically human creatures bracketed me, the

Manager peered at me with puffy, crazy-looking eyes behind

a pair of cracked wire-frame spectacles. Then he pushed a

sheet of printed paper and a writing stylus across the table.

„Sign.‟

This was the first comprehensible word I‟d heard from the

basically human things. I‟d like to say it sounded monstrous

and full of insane maniacal glee, but in fact it seemed a

perfectly normal voice, the worst you could say about it being

that it was a little croaky from disuse. The Surgeon, on the

other hand, spoilt the effect by doing a mad little giggle into

his sleeve.

The basically human creatures on either side of me started

to growl, so I picked up the paper and read it. Strangely,

given the surroundings, it was utterly pristine. This, and I tell

no lie, is what it said:

I the undersigned hereby apply for gainful employment

under the auspices of Sleed Incorporated SA,

hereinafter to be referred to as the Incorporation, and

further agree to submit and perform to any such

requirement as a duly appointed officer of the

Incorporation may see fit. I fully and without reserve

indemnify the Incorporation against any loss or

personal injury such as might be pursuant to such

requirements.

(Signature/Date)_____________________

Quicker on the uptake than most I might be, but I stared at

the thing dumbfounded. Unless I was very much mistaken, I

was being asked to sign a release form.

„I don‟t think it can read,‟ said the Surgeon, in a high-

pitched, innately petulant-sounding voice that was if

anything worse than the giggle. He snapped his fingers and a

basically human creature grabbed my hand, picked up the

stylus in it and forced it to scrawl a ragged cross on the

paper. The Manager examined the result critically, then put it

away in a drawer and looked me up and down again.

„Not what you‟d call proper material,‟ he mused

disparagingly. „Not what you‟d call properly alive, but I

suppose we could find a use for it. Could you find a use for it,

Dr Finley?‟

This to the Surgeon, whose face lit up in a radiant smile.

„Oh, can I really. Administrator Skinner?‟ he said with

childlike eagerness. „Oh yes, I can. I‟ve got a new experiment

it‟d be perfect for. I just thought it up, all by myself...‟

I didn‟t like the sound of this one bit.

A pair of basically human creatures secured me to an

operating table by way of thick leather straps. I seemed to

have been secured a disproportionate lot like this, since

waking up on the Ship, but if I‟d had the choice I would have

plumped for the conditions there. The conditions here looked

like the surgery of some mad doctor from an old horror

movie, after several impromptu mad-doctor surgical

procedures had been done with a chainsaw and a bacon

slicer, with the walls never being cleaned up afterwards.

The Surgeon, Finley, loomed over me, grinning happily. He

was clutching a little bronze statue to himself, that of an

elderly, patrician-looking man leaning on a cane. I didn‟t see

how he thought he was going to inflict much damage on me

with it, but then again it all depended on where he stuck it.

„Do you know what this is?‟ he said to me, chattily,

caressing the statuette in a manner that had me suspecting

that what he really wanted to be doing was licking it.

Why don‟t you surprise me?‟ I said, and instantly regretted

it. The simple fact of talking split open my skinned and only

partially healed lips in several places. I mastered the pain

with the manfulness and self-control that is my watchword:

„Ow! Fuck! Shitfuckshitfuckshitshitfuckfuckfuck!‟

The Surgeon made a little moue of disapproval, and held

the little statue closer to him, as though to protect it from the

language. „It‟s the Sleed Award for Extremely Advanced

Experimental Sagacity,‟ he said in a slightly hurt tone of

voice. „I was awarded it for the procedure I invented for

excising the intestines of a subject and making them into

three entirely separate balloon animals before he died.‟ His

eyes misted over reminiscently. „Of course, that was in the

days when there were more subjects than I could count...‟

„Yes?‟ I said, just for the sake of keeping up my end of the

conversation, you understand. “What happened to all these

subjects then?‟

„All gone,‟ said Finley the Surgeon, sadly. „All subsumed or

gone.‟

„Oh, you poor thing,‟ I said.

„Well, it doesn‟t do to live in the past, though, does it?‟ said

Finley the Surgeon, tossing the statuette aside and assuming

a new sense of purpose. „Let‟s begin, shall we?‟ He pulled on

a pair of rubber gloves that seemed more suited to washing

up than surgical procedure, and started rooting around a

tray of old, encrusted hammers, hacksaw blades and other

hardware appliances. Tell you what: we‟ll whip off the old

meat and two veg first, and then we‟ll see about swapping

over your hands and feet and sewing them back on...‟

Things had now, in my humble and considered opinion,

gone quite far enough. The straps had been designed to hold

your basic human type, so, while I didn‟t exactly snap them

with no further damage to myself, I was at least able to do it

and get out. I grabbed hold of Finley the Surgeon‟s head

before he could so much as begin to meet, got my finger in

his eyes and pulled his head apart. This was what, I later

learnt, the manual I‟d read on the Ship had referred to as

Full Combat Mode. I didn‟t recognize it at the time because

I‟d thought of it as something I had to consciously trigger,

and I‟d been trying ever since, when it was in fact just one of

those things you go into when you need to.

The basically human creatures who had brought me here

and tied me down were now coming for me, so I threw the

scalpels from Finley the Surgeon‟s pocket and several of the

sharper items from the tray at them until they went down.

Though I still couldn‟t spot the distinctions, I now know that,

so far as those creatures went, they were as low on the scale

as you could go – the equivalent of foot-soldier cannon

fodder. If they hadn‟t been, I‟d have died in about three

seconds.

I looked down at the body of Finley the Surgeon, then

pulled off his filthy and now freshly and catastrophically

stained coat, purely to hold the various blades and other

items I could scavenge from the room and use as weapons. In

my current physical state I had no hope of passing for

anybody, but I had the vague idea that the basically human

creatures operated on a kind of pattern recognition and, if

and when I encountered them, it couldn‟t hurt to try.

Then I left, out into the dark and mismatched tunnels,

looking for some way out and up.

CHAPTER 4

In the sense of albedos and the planetary rotational physical

specifics, day-and-night cycles in the Proximan Chain are

meaningless. On the other hand, the humanoid body tends to

operate upon a deep, diurnal level so fundamental that

biomodifications can‟t touch it. I woke up the next morning

feeling a hell of a lot better than I had the night before. The

loss of Kara was compacted and vacuum wrapped inside me,

to be brought out and examined later, when I had the time to

do it properly, but it wouldn‟t keep me from doing the job in

the here and now.

I climbed up off the floor and slapped the inset panel in the

wall to start the music. No half-arsed ideas of „recapturing

my childhood‟ involved: I just favour the recorded music from

the later half of the twentieth century because it was the era

when they still produced and recorded some of it in the

analogue rather than the digital - it hits you in the gut, on so

many levels that you don‟t consciously notice, even after

going through the processes of archival through the

centuries. Everything else just seems somehow lightweight,

sterile and stale - like the packaged „relief products ZipCo

tries to sell you night and day compared with the real thing.

Mr John Lydon informed me that, fuck, he couldn‟t

remember the words.

Fortunately, during my mindless episode of destruction the

night before, I‟d pretty much missed the refresher alcove. I

showered off on a stim-cycle, pulled on a robe and messed

about with my face and hair. I don‟t use make-up much

during the day: liner, mascara and toner in black, blue and

gold respectively, and I left it at that. My lips are naturally

darker in a way that would suggest tattooing on your basic

human type, so I didn‟t bother with the lippy, on the grounds

that I didn‟t intend to leave my mark on anybody today. In

that sense, at least.

The music switched to something cheerful from The Magic

Flute. I wandered out into the living chamber and to the

kitchen. „Anything I should be aware of during the night?‟ I

asked Box in passing.

„I had a weird little time lapse,‟ Box said. „Forty-five

standard minutes. Extrapolation from various known factors

suggests that our guest used it to make some calls. Do you

want me to pin it down precisely?‟

I thought about it while I put together breakfast and stuck

some mocha in the filter. „It‟s probably not worth wasting the

cycles. Let‟s let it go for the moment. Is our visitor awake?‟

My own bedroom is soundproofed and I don‟t allow Box‟s

extensions inside it, balancing off the potential risks from

any number of different areas against a sense of privacy. I

don‟t extend that privacy to the spare room, however, on

account of not being a total bloody fool.

„Still out like a light,‟ Box said.

„Wake her up, will you? Try it gently and then escalate. The

point is that I want her to be up.’’

„Up what,‟ said Box, „particularly?‟ I was really going to

have to change those interactive routines for company.

The coffee finished running through the filter and I poured

a couple of cups, left the food under the grill to keep warm

and took the cups out. The door to the spare room opened on

a wake-up alarm on the level of a stratospheric flier going

through the sound barrier with a backbeat.

Bernice was hauling herself into a sitting position and

swearing like a trooper who had stubbed his toe and taken a

course in swearing, advanced, lower ranks, for the use of,

besides. She looked like someone coming off a three-day

bender - I wondered how much she‟d been drinking before I

met her. The glass or two she‟d had in Braxiatel‟s apartment

didn‟t count.

„Have some coffee,‟ I said.

Bernice did that look you get when you wake up with a

hangover and are trying to remember who you are – then did

a little so-so, satisfied expression and leant over to toss her

diary, unopened, on the small pile of clothes she had been

wearing under her Suit of Lights™. She‟s the sort of person

who, quite frankly, gives off the impression of wearing a chic

little singlet in bed even if she isn‟t, which she wasn‟t now.

She took the coffee, reaching out for it as careless of her

nakedness as a girl in a certain kind of old French

cinematograph, as opposed to, well, another kind of

European movie. She downed half the cup in one gulp.

„You can‟t get the staff these days,‟ she said, her voice

still slightly dry in both senses of the word. „The well-trained

valet does not come into a lady‟s bedroom, especially if the

lady is a yummy little knockout like me.‟

„Oh, be still, my beating prostate,‟ I said.

I stirred the pile of worn clothing with my foot. I got the

impression that they had been worn for rather longer than

the day before, in the manner of one who decides to change

the wardrobe only when the items in it physically stick to the

wall. „Are you going to go out in these?‟

Bernice shrugged. „They‟ll last another day.‟

„Not without giving you some nasty chafing along the crack

lines,‟ I said. „Those jagged edges where the crust breaks

don‟t half take off the skin.‟ I wandered out, spent a happy

five minutes rooting through the wreckage that was my own

bedroom and then came back with some undershorts, an all-

purpose stretch suit and a yellow chamois jacket I‟d fallen in

love with in the store, and then got home to find it was two

sizes too small - that subconscious feeling that I should be

inhabiting a different body than the one I wear still comes

back to haunt me, sometimes. I had also picked up another

personal-keyed little comms unit, a twin to the one I was now

wearing again. The vagaries of an investigation might mean

we would lose direct contact with each other, and we needed

a relatively secure way of talking over distance.

„There you go,‟ I said, tossing her the bundle of clean

clothes. „All part of the service.‟

Bernice fingered the jacket dubiously. „Is this genuine?‟

„Price I paid, I bloody well hope so,‟ I said.

„I have to tell you that I don‟t wear products from some

defenceless animal,‟ said Bernice, „if I can possibly help it‟

„Well excuse me while I go out and staple it back on the

sheep. Wear what you like, it‟s your business.‟

Bernice considered the jacket for a moment, then shrugged

to herself and started to get dressed.

We didn‟t use the floater that had conveyed us on our jaunt

the night before. I picked a random hov-car from the

charging racks and, by way of certain skills and a large

helping of black-market technology, set it down on the

hydraulics and broke in. This is part and parcel of the

process in dealing with potential surveillance. You don‟t get

anywhere if you treat anyone and everything you see and

touch with paranoid suspicion on the basis that it or they

might just possibly be in on it. You adopt a random strategy,

mixing changes to your routine with following it just as

though nothing was happening - the exponential cost in time,

resources and effort involved in second-guessing and

covering all the bases means that you‟ll break free from any

traces or tags put on you by sheer force of attrition. This

leaves you, personally, calm and relaxed and ready to deal

with any threat when it actually comes.

I patched a garbage ID into the car‟s transponder, which

would work well enough for long enough, and punched in our

destination. We blipped through the transit system in the

same way we had before, the only difference being that we

could see out - which made no effective difference at all, what

we saw being merely speed-blur and the stuttering flashes as

we went through the actual transmats.

The waste-disposal and recycling systems of the Proximan

Chain were relatively centralized, in the way that such things

seem to be - the rather-not-think attitude of people contriving

to give the blanket idea that some disaster taking out the

only rubbish dump would not be too great a loss. The

disposal plant was located on an airless and, in spatial

terms, out-of-the-way moonlet packed with the various

apparatus to deal with anything from the extremely toxic to

the mildly unpleasant. If you saw it from orbit you‟d see a

tangled ball of piping, superstructures pocked with the

explosions of escaping methane gas.

The disposal of dead bodies, on the other hand, was a

slightly different matter. As with planetary politics or

sausage-making, the more you know about it the worse you

like it, and so far as the Proximan recycling plants go the

latter analogy is particularly appropriate. (I‟ve just reread

that, incidentally, and it comes across as though the plants

were in the business of doing a kinda Soylent Green. It‟s not

as bad as that, there being several more environmental food-

chain steps before the organic matter makes it back into the

population itself. You just wouldn‟t want to see it happening

in front of you.)

In any event, this particular area of operation offers a

number of slightly more salubrious front ends, ranging from

the tasteful (you should pardon the expression) funeral

parlour to the pathologically clinical. We left the car and went

through an access hatch into the antiseptic whiteness of a

hospital-like reception area. A bored-looking girl of around

seventeen, in a nurse uniform so archetypical that it could

only be a costume, buffed her nails behind a desk and

absently watched a viewscreen set to one of the local-

subsidiary GalNet shopping channels: a guy from ZipCo,

accent, was demonstrating a pair of polymerized overshoes

that, apparently, inflated to cushion your feet while picking

up dust from the floor with their adhesive soles, all for an

only excruciatingly exorbitant and exclusive price. Various

other people were here on their respective business.

Somebody was waiting for us. A thin woman in her early

twenties with a tough, pinched face under straggle-ragged

hair, dressed in a voluminous coat of tissue-thin leather over

something skin-tight, black and shiny. I recognized her

instantly.

„Morning, Mira,‟ I said as she stalked over to us in a

manner that might seem actively furious if one was unaware

of her innately spiky nature. I‟ve never learnt any other name

she might have other than Mira. I think she might be one of

those people who don‟t have other names.

I‟d met her back when I was working on the job that

eventually brought me into contact with Bernice. The body

under the black polypropylene was packed with so many

superconductive sensors and mind scanners, hooked directly

to her brain, that she was the nearest thing you could have

to the old sci-fi idea of a telepath in a universe where the old

ideas of telepathic powers simply don‟t exist. If Mira was

here, I thought, then certain other contacts couldn‟t be far

away. I looked around again with the idea of locating Benny‟s

ex-husband, and drew a complete blank. The idea that

someone can disguise himself when someone is actively

looking is complete holomovie bollocks in any case - and

there was nobody, here who could possibly be him, however

he might be disguised.

Mira gave an absent little hiya-wave to me, then turned to

Bernice. ‘ Lovely to see you again, darling.‟ The zero-kelvin

way she said it, and the way she fingered Benny‟s borrowed

jacket like she was going to have to wipe her hand

afterwards, told me that there were other things going on

here than simple innate spikiness. There had been a shifting,

if not a fundamental change, in their relationship since the

last time we‟d all met.

„That‟s a little bit of a young look for you, isn‟t it?‟ Mira said.

„You carry it off very well, though, for a woman your age.‟

„Why, thank you, sweetheart,‟ said Benny. „Tell me, have

you grown hair you can sit on yet?‟

Pleasantries out of the way, Mira explained matters to me,

while Bernice cleared, claimed and ID‟d things with the

receptionist:

„I‟m gonna go in and do a deep scan - not just the brain

core but the vestigial traces of nerve impulse, factor in the

external data, that sort of thing. See if I can‟t construct an

integrated real-time model of what was going on in her head

when she died. Face-of-the-killer stuff, you know?‟

I recalled the old myth about the last thing one sees before

dying being etched into the eyes. I looked at her dubiously.

„You can really do something like that?‟

„I‟m one of the few people who can. That‟s why I make the

big shillings.‟ Mira waggled a hand. „Twenty-five to thirty-five

per cent probability, though. Maybe on the upper end of that

since we‟re dealing with an APE subject. The dendritic

pathways are physically stronger, the pattern more

pronounced. At the very least it helps to eliminate the

extraneous factors.‟

Benny finished working out the access privileges and we

headed off down guide-lit corridors for the viewing room

where Kara‟s body was laid out. Mira‟s scan would

apparently take some time but, as for myself, I went in, had a

look and came out again.

I had to see the body for myself, of course, just to make

sure that there were no clues associated with it that only I

could pick up on, that the identifying of it hadn‟t just been

some ghastly case of mistaken identity - and even to make

sure that the whole thing hadn‟t been some carefully

contrived hoax, on any number of levels and from any

number of directions, with no body actually there at all. The

short answers to these questions were respectively that there

weren‟t, it hadn‟t been and it hadn‟t - and after I‟d got them I

didn‟t feel the need to stick around.

Anything else I might or might not have been feeling has no

real place here, not having any effect on the facts of matters

either way, and I don‟t really want to talk about it.

Extract from the. diary of Bernice Summerfield:

After [section deliberately defaced on source material] had left

us alone with the body, I turned to Mira. „So what do you

think.‟

„Well...‟ Mira did a thoughtful little teeth-sucking, tutting

thing that I found incredibly irritating on the spot. „He‟s

changed since the last time I met him. He‟s going through a

bit of an identity crisis, for one thing - focusing on the fact

that he‟s technically an APE even in the face of his true

impulses. The problem is that his life memories and identity

are real, if you get me: fully formed and complete, and not

some cobbled-together back-story with the holes you can

stick a fist through like your average Artificial. He has all the

same little insecurities, ambiguities and conflicts as you or

me, but channelled through a physical neurotechture that

amplifies them, jacks them to a point that we - you in

particular, that is - can‟t properly imagine. He‟s stuck

between two worlds in an almost literal sense at the moment,

holding things together under that carefully maintained,

detached and cocky surface that only lets the deep stuff out

by implication, and he‟s not quite sure if he can cope…‟

I was feeling very tired, and I knew that Mira could

continue in this quasi-psychobabble vein for an hour if I let

her. If you‟re to have any chance of thinking of yourself as

good and kind and living in a civilized manner then you must

try to have sympathy for others, treat them at least twice as

well as you might privately think they deserve, try to see the

other person‟s point of view and give them the benefit of the

doubt, even in the privacy of your own head. Now, I just gave

in to all the confusion and little vaguely hurtful feelings and

flashes of anger I tried not to feel when I thought about Mira

- for any number of reasons - and I imagined giving her such

a slap.

She snapped back as if I‟d physically done it. Then she

looked at me strangely, focused on me in a way that had me

suddenly trying to think about nothing at all.

„He didn‟t do it,‟ she said simply. „There‟s no possibility,

even, that he did it in a psychotic episode that he‟s blanked.‟

She paused, thoughtfully, and then said something else

with a little edge of wistfulness. „Remember how I said he felt

things on a level we can never really understand? Well, quite

apart from anything else, what he felt for her - Mira gestured

to the body on the slab „- words can‟t touch. I can‟t say the

word strong enough to make you feel it.‟

I must admit that I felt a kind of overwhelming relief, as if a

truly close friend had narrowly escaped an accident, or had

miraculously recovered from what was a supposedly

terminal...

I mean, in any life there are people whom you know, for

good or bad, for one reason or another - people who,

whatever you might think or feel about them, stand out from

the mobile scenery of life‟s walk-on extras, sharp and

distinct. Artificial Personality Embodiments, by their

physically enhanced nature, circumvent that process and

stand out by a kind of default.

In one sense I had simply met [section defaced on source]

and vaguely liked him, but in another I had really met and

vaguely liked him. I‟m not expressing that properly. It‟s like

what Mira said about not being able to use That Word. I

know what I mean but I can‟t...

Anyway, that‟s just why the first thing I felt was relief,

rather than annoyance, at what might, just possibly, have

been a promising lead coming to a complete stop.

„So Brax‟s first suspicions are groundless,‟ I said. „Oh well.‟

I gestured to the body. We might as well do what we said we

were going to do in the first place.

[Extract ends.]

I walked out into the reception area and breathed deeply

again. I‟d had a kind of phobic impulse in the morgue

corridors to try not to suck too much of the death around me

into my lungs - which was complete bollocks of course, but I

hadn‟t thought it worth the effort to try to counter.

Reception was as I‟d left it: the same girl at the desk,

watching the same dismal ZipCo infomercial or one very

much like it, the same people sitting or standing around

waiting - with one particular, and not particularly nice,

exception. He must have been waiting somewhere private,

waiting and monitoring us, because I knew for a fact he

hadn‟t been there before.

„I‟d like a word with you about certain matters, sunshine,‟

this exception said, laying a hand on my shoulder with the

kind of gentle but insistent pressure that suggested he could

press my shoulder a lot harder if he wanted to. I swear to the

various applicable gods that those were the precise words

that he used. All things considered, it was a wonder he

hadn‟t said, „What‟s all this that‟s occurring? You‟re nicked,

my son, and you‟re going down for a ten stretch.‟

It was a SecServ™ officer. Now, I‟ve mentioned that the

Proximan Chain doesn‟t have a legal system as such - how

can you have a blanket and inclusive law in the face of

several thousand different species, let alone all the various

and multifarious subcultures of them that set their own

personal definitions on what is actually a crime or not?

The short answer is that you can‟t. The slightly more

complex answer, that being the one you have to live with in

the real world, is that various concerns have set themselves

up as enforcers of „law and order‟ on an individual basis -

whether being funded on the intercorporate level to look after

some incorporation‟s interests, or as what, on other planets

and in other places, would be called vigilante squads or

private security companies.

In the ultimate and abstract sense, these people were no

more than one set of factions among any number of others,

with no more actual right to perform their mission in life than

I might have to smash a glass bottle across somebody‟s face

just because I don‟t happen to like it. But, by that token, any

so-called authority you can name in the galaxy operates in

the precise same way - they do what they can get away with,

impose their will upon the masses by the strength of their

consensus, and get away with it only so long as the masses

will stand still for it and not stick the bastards, en masse, up

against the wall. In the practical sense, in the here and now

of the Proximan Chain, these policing services perform the

nearest function to a consensually agreed-upon authority we

have - and I was uneasily aware of the fact that SecServ™

had laid their claim upon the body of Kara Delbane.

This particular officer was in the bulky, padded and

reinforced SecServ™ trenchcoat that has evolved over the

years into a distinct uniform as opposed to the „plain clothes‟

from which it originally came. The uniform of the sort of

copper who‟s supposed to solve murders, as opposed to those

who direct traffic, or stand outside hab-domes in the hopes

that someone might try to break in. He was shorter than me

but wider, stocky in a way that suggested an innate brute

physical strength rather than simply being fat. His hair was

dark and short, dragged back and slicked from a blocky,

nondescript face that could have been anyone, provided that

this anyone spent his entire life being surly with a face like a

smacked arse.

„I believe you‟re one of the party who came here to view the

body of one Kara Delbane,‟ he said, in the sort of friendly

manner that in real terms translates into an active threat.

„I might be,‟ I said. „What‟s it to you?‟

He pulled a little card out of his trenchcoat and flashed it -

that‟s just a part of the ritual for these people, incidentally,

and it doesn‟t mean a thing at all. „Investigator Roland

Forrester, SecServ™ Security Services,‟ he said. „Just what is

your connection with the deceased?‟

I didn‟t see any reason to lie. „I was a friend.‟

„And the two... ladies you were with?‟

„Her employer and a specialist.‟

On the receptionist‟s viewing screen, I was peripherally

aware, a news item had come on to break up the

advertisements. Something about how the GenCorp™

Incorporation were still denying that they‟d mislaid three

separate interplanetary tankers of raw mutagenic materials,

even after two of them had turned up. Then the receptionist

changed the channel on to more adverts and I filtered them

out again.

„A specialist?‟ The Secman was glaring at me with sudden

investigatorial fervour. „What kind of specialist, precisely? I

really hope you‟re not thinking of taking the law into your

own hands...‟

„I‟ve had enough of this,‟ I said. „We‟ve claimed the body,

produced evidence to the effect of prior right of interest, and

the services of SecServ™ Security Services are no longer

required. You will, of course, be paid the standard finder‟s fee

by usual channels - and that‟s all you‟re getting, you slimy

little corpse-chaser.‟

„What?‟ The Secman seemed taken aback for a moment,

then he recovered somewhat. „I don‟t think you understand

the situation, chum. There‟s been a murder here, and the

last thing you want to do is -‟

„The last thing I want to do,‟ I said, „is listen to your sales

pitch one second longer. Word of advice, you sorry little shit.

Don‟t try to do the you-could-be-a-suspect line with someone

who loved her and could rip your spine out if he felt like it.‟

(I have to mention something here, just for myself. I‟ve only

just realized that this was the first and only time I used that

particular and unnamed word about Kara and I have to make

a note of it, and call it to attention, even if the only attention

I‟m calling it to is myself. And if you, who wanted me to write

this out, have a problem with it on some circumstantiality-is-

everything basis then you can fuck right off.)

There is something I call my „better-dead‟ list. I don‟t mean

that I‟m burning to actively kill everybody on it: I just mean

that, as you meet people and get to know them in general,

you sometimes ask yourself if the world would be a basically

better or worse place if they just suddenly dropped dead. It‟s

just a part and parcel of the process of living and meeting

people. Sometimes you really feel that strongly, in the sense

that if there‟s some old bint in the queue in front of you (for

whatever you happen to be queuing for), arguing for ten

minutes about the point five of a credit that she thinks she‟s

been short-changed, you could cheerfully stick a bolt-blaster

to the back of her hairy-mole-encrusted neck and kill her.

I‟d felt that way since „Investigator Forrester‟ had

importuned me with his posturing SecServ™ I‟m-

investigating-the-murder scam, and had consciously forced

myself not to evidence it for the simple reason that, with Kara

dead in the morgue rooms behind me, and how I felt about

that, I had the nasty feeling that if I let those feelings out I

would have killed this „Investigator Forrester‟ on the spot.

The upshot of all that was that he‟d misinterpreted my

restraint as standard bereaved-friend irrationality at anyone

offering the practicalities of help. So he tried the alternative

pitch: „Listen,‟ he said, with that curious blend of

conspiratorial menace that people think sounds threatening.

„It could have very easily been you who killed her. We can

make it look like that whether you did or you didn‟t. If you

know what‟s good for you, then you‟ll -‟

The thing about going into what, I suppose, I have to call

Combat Mode is that you go into a state where you pull in

every other stimulus and integrate it instantly, and act upon

it in accelerated time, whereas your basic human types are

dealing in slow-motion human reactions. Thus it was - so far

as I was concerned - that I heard the hatchway to the morgue

rooms behind me open, and saw the change in manner on

Forrester‟s face, long before the hand I was bringing up had

so much as a chance to hit his nose and drive the cartilage

up into the brain. I dropped down several mental gears and

turned the motion into simply bringing my hand up to fiddle

with my hair.

Forrester backed away and turned. „Just you wait,‟ he

snarled, trying to cover up his belated reaction to my flash of

killing anger with bravado. „One of these days you‟ll find

yourself on my patch, and then we‟ll see what‟s what...‟ He

headed for the exit in a kind of scuttling run. I turned around

to see that Mira and Bernice were coming out from the

morgues. Neither of them seemed exactly happy.

„Who was that?‟ Mira asked me, jerking her thumb in the

direction the Secman had gone.

„Nobody important,‟ I said. „Just one of the SecServ™

people trying it on. Why are you out so soon? I thought you‟d

take more time than that.‟

„There was nothing,‟ said Bernice, dispiritedly.

„What she means,‟ said Mira, „is that there was literally

nothing. Just a random pattern. Everything in the brain pan

was wiped, catastrophically and from the inside. From the

feel of things, it seems like she did it herself.‟

I remembered my time in the Oblivion Angels. We were

each of us fitted with ail imposed mental construct that could

trigger total and complete identity collapse as the sort of last-

ditch equivalent of a suicide pill. Later, for various reasons,

I‟d had that construct yanked so that I couldn‟t trigger it even

if I really wanted to.

Obviously, Kara hadn‟t. This tied in with what I‟d read in

the surveillance transcripts, people asking her questions and

coming out with nothing - I hadn‟t made that specific

connection at the time because, with an APE, in a certain line

of business, your or somebody else‟s particular Killing

Thought is one of those things you simply don‟t think or talk

about.

„So there‟s nothing more we can learn from the body or the

mind,‟ I said. „So, working from the inside out, the next best

bet is where she lived.‟

„Count me out,‟ said Mira. „I‟ve done my job, and I don‟t

have any expertise with the inanimate.‟

„Suit yourself,‟ said Bernice, icily, and it seemed that Mira‟s

involvement with this particular job had come to an end.

As we left the disposal complex, though, Benny and I to our

appropriated car and Mira to whatever mode of transport she

was using, Mira touched my arm and held me back while

Benny went on ahead.

„Give me a call,‟ she said, slipping a little business-contact

plaque into my pocket. „Any time you need to.‟

„I‟m not that kind of guy,‟ I said.

„Now, if I thought you thought I wasn‟t talking about the job

and weren‟t just being facetious for the hell of it,‟ said Mira,

„I‟d give you such a smack your ears would ring. But you

know that I know what you‟re thinking, and you‟re not, so I

won‟t.‟

Abruptly, she became utterly serious, looking at me with

eyes filled with a deep and strangely indefinable concern that

I thought - being able to tag physical identifiers, rather than

having the talent to read anybody‟s mind other than my own

- that she was not even fully aware of herself.

„Treat Summerfield carefully.‟ she said. „I don‟t mean treat

her with suspicion: I mean treat her gently. The gods alone

know I don‟t like her much, but there‟s some things you

wouldn‟t want to wish on a dog.‟

„What do you mean?‟ I said.

„There‟s something inside her,‟ said Mira. „I can‟t quite get a

handle on it, and I can‟t give you a clinical diagnosis or

anything, but it‟s inside her head and it‟s killing her. She‟s

dying.‟

BACKGROUND 5

Up through the unlit tunnels, up through twisting, barely

illuminated corridors, up cast-iron spiral stairs winding

through chimney shafts, and staircases winding around great

brick vaults. The output from the little tracer unit in my head

hadn‟t been noticeable when I‟d been with Kara, mostly on

account of the fact that I could see where she was anyway,

but since the time we‟d been split up I‟d found that I could

pinpoint roughly where she was if I wanted to, in the sense

that she was above me and over to one side. The best bet at

this point was simply to go up, working my way laterally

when I could, and see what happened. I wasn‟t feeling

particularly heroic, just possessed of a kind of bloody minded

determination that, if she was still alive, I was damned if I

was going to leave her in this place.

I encountered surprisingly few basically human monsters,

and managed to slip past those I did. I got the disquieting

impression, though, something like the way you know when

there are people in a house even though you can‟t directly see

them, that there were thousands of the things, scuttling

through the dark places of the incorporate structure. Even

so, whether there were thousands left or not, I got the

distinct impression that this place had once housed millions.

I had no doubt in my mind that it was these basically

human creatures who had been responsible for the

devastation outside - but just where had they all gone after?

The best theory I could come up with, at this point, for their

depleted numbers, was that, after they had killed everyone

they could, they had turned upon and started killing each

other. (Everybody who knows about Sharabeth now, of

course, knows that the processes that made these creatures

included a form of self-destruct, but at the time I didn‟t know

that.)

At length, I clambered up through a kind of skylight and

found myself on an expanse of roof, the various tiles and

slates and strips of waterproof sheeting - as had been

everything else in the incorporation - cannibalized from the

city below and stuck together every which way. Overhead, the

variegated sky still boiled. Everything‟s relative, and I have to

say that coming out into the open air – even open air such as

this - was like finding yourself back in the world of men after

a trip through the furnaces of Hell.

Kara, my little subcranial tracer told me, was

approximately fifty metres off in one direction and maybe ten

or fifteen down. I crawled across the rooftop, keeping my

centre of gravity as low as possible and my weight spread out

as much as I could. Even so, and more than once, some

fragile bit of tiling fractured under me, or a slate worked

loose to skid off down the incline. I have no idea if any of

them actually fell off the edge, being slightly more concerned

with trying to stop myself from doing that precise same thing.

There was a distinct lack of skylights, access hatches or

trapdoors around the area I judged Kara to be in, so I braced

myself so far as I could, smashed a smallish hole through the

tiles, got a grip on what felt like a carbonized joist and hauled

myself through before the surrounding area of roofing fell

away in the equivalent of a small avalanche. If there‟d been a

basically human creature or two below me, they‟d have been

on to me like a shot, but fortunately there wasn‟t. (I wonder,

sometimes, if the fact that, in the real life I know, I‟ve hardly

ever made one of those dramatic entrances where I have to

disable a bunch of guards and the suchlike isn‟t down to the

fact that my accelerated APE brain factors in all the

subliminal cues of such things, and just flatly stops me from

going into those kinds of situation in the first place. If there

had been basically human monsters waiting for me, I‟d have

simply waited till they‟d gone, or found some other way to get

in, without really thinking about it.)

I hung from the joist and, in the shifting light from the sky

above and the stuttering fluorescents ranged around, I saw

that I was in a big chamber filled with surgical couches

rather more hi-tech than the one I‟d so recently been on

myself in the company of Finley the Surgeon. Almost all of

them were occupied, but not with anything alive. There were

other items of equipment.

Fixed into a table almost directly below me was Kara. She

was now, at least, alive and awake - but my first reaction was

to wish that she wasn‟t.

Now, look - everyone now knows what happened, what was

done on Sharabeth in what have become known as the

Engenesis Rooms. The special and particular horror of it…

We all know about it, so far as such things can be known,

and I‟m not going to retread the details of it here. At the time,

the secondary evidence of the... well, the remains on the

tables was sickening enough. I noticed, though, with a kind

of shuddering lurch of relief that seemed an almost physical

thing in my heart, that Kara didn‟t seem to have been put

through the worst of what I suppose I have to call the

procedures.

I didn‟t think I was quite up to a ten-metre drop, APE

bioenhancements or not, so I monkey-swung through the

diverse selection of joists and beams supporting the roof and

shinned down a support pillar that seemed to have been

fashioned by taking a large stone statue of some alien

creature with most of the more interesting appendages

knocked off. As I walked back to Kara, she stared at me in

panic and a kind of pure hatred. From the look of it, she was

trying to fight against the restraints encasing her, and failing

miserably due to the fact that they were contrived to render

her almost utterly immobile. I was a little hurt by this

reaction, before I belatedly remembered my flappy Surgeon‟s

coat and the state of the body inside it.

„Look it‟s me, OK?‟ I said. „It‟s me.‟

Kara stopped straining against the restraints and looked at

me dumbly for a moment. Then her face sort of collapsed in

on itself in that way people‟s faces do when they are about to

burst into tears. Abruptly, she took control of herself, and let

out a long, shaky breath.

„Ye gods, but you look a mess,‟ she said.

„And don‟t I just know it?‟ I started fiddling with the

restraining units, looking for the trick of them. There was

something I needed to ask, but didn‟t quite know how to

other than to just come out and say it: „What did they do to

you? What happened?‟

„Nothing, much.‟ Kara‟s face and voice were perfectly

controlled, but it was with the control of one who was

consciously forcing herself to be it. „I mean, those creatures

went through the motions, but it was like they were on a

kind of locked-in program, going through the motions. They

kept trying to do stuff with things that didn‟t work or weren‟t

there at all. That went on for days, so far as I can work out. I

kept drifting in and out. It was like this kind of slow torture

of waiting, knowing that at some point they‟d hit on

something or other that still worked…‟

Kara seemed to shudder a little, inside her restraints. I

glanced around at the remains again, and at the items that

in one way or another had reduced them to that state,

towards an end that was later confirmed but which I could

work out here and now simply by looking, and I repressed a

little shudder myself. If the rerun mockery of those

procedures had gone on for days, though, just where were

the things that had been doing it?

„So where are they now?‟ I asked her, peering into the dark

shadows at the edges of the chamber that now suddenly

might or might not contain any number of basically human

monsters waiting with murderous intent.

They just stopped,‟ said Kara. „A couple of hours ago, I

think. It was like they were all listening to something I

couldn‟t hear, and then they went. I have no idea what it was

about, but I got the impression that it was something out of

the ordinary.‟

A couple of hours ago would have been just about the time

I was dealing with Finley the Surgeon and a couple of

basically human guards. „You know, I think they might be

looking for me,‟ I said.

„Oh yes?‟ Kara raised an eyebrow in a kind of mildly ironic

way that, in contrast to the situation in which we‟d found

ourselves, made me suddenly want to giggle like a child.

“What did you do to annoy them? I mean, you seem so nice.‟

„This and that,‟ I said. „I think it‟s just my pretty face.‟ Not

the wittiest of comebacks, I‟ll admit, but I think it was quite

good given the circumstances.

I finally worked out how to release Kara‟s restraints, which

were secured with a kind of interlocking system of thin

metallic filaments, which I had never encountered before,

and which were opened by pulling on a certain number of

them in order. The restraints racked back in three big

sections, and Kara sort of lurched up and started working

some kind of life back into her cramplocked limbs. The gash

across her chest now looked severely infected, and she was

covered in injuries left by certain items of equipment here,

that may not have been powered up but were nasty enough

even in themselves, but she still seemed basically healthy

enough to walk. She‟d better be.

„I think it might be an idea,‟ I said, over the muttered litany

of ouching, damning and cursing common to those trying to

work life back into cramplocked limbs, „if we followed the

example of your basically human friends, and just went.‟

CHAPTER 5

The doors to Kara‟s apartments were strung with a yellow

cat‟s cradle of sticky tape, through which could be barely

read a sticker with a SecServ™ decal, saying how this was a

secure crime scene, and that visits could be arranged for a

small fee on this contact number. The security-sensor

package that had once been lag-bolted to the wall had been

smashed off, and the doors‟ physical locks had been

circumvented by the extremely subtle measure of a fourteen-

kilo sledgehammer down one side.

„That‟s how they got in,‟ I said.

„What, the killers?‟ said Bernice, dubiously eyeing the

damage. „That doesn‟t tic in very well with the transcripts.‟

„I mean the private security boys. Nothing like „em for

eradicating every single bit of usable evidence without

noticing.‟ I stripped off several handfuls of tape and the door

swung freely open.

I was surprised the apartment hadn‟t been stripped clean,

the time it must have spent with the doors unlocked. Maybe

the SecServ™ guys had posted someone out front, to be

recalled after I‟d made it clear that they could go and attempt

to fructify their own persons. In any event, Kara‟s place

seemed relatively intact and pretty much the same as the last

time I‟d been there, the only damage being the general boot

marks and breakages of blundering free-enterprise plods.

The comms installation was still there, and appeared to

have been liberally dusted for prints by the look of the thing.

I very much doubted that any kind of testing for residual

DNA had been done - I wasn‟t about to start mopping up skin

cells and dried spit myself, of course, not being that kind of

investigator. I found a solid-state carbonizing writing stylus

in my jacket and used it to access the controls.

The SecServ™ people had played the messages through, so

I went back to the most recently stored files. One from me,

just checking if she was asleep, or up and around to pick up.

A steady stream of standard ZipCo crap - and one call that

seemed slightly more intriguing than somewhat. The time

readouts placed it dead on the money for the call we‟d noted

on the transcripts:

„Kara? Hi. It‟s me.‟ A male voice, thirtyish-sounding and

kind of friendly-acquaintance rather than close-friendly in

tone. Nothing particularly interesting or distinctive about the

accent; it was just that null accent you hear on GalNet

broadcasts, the default setting for one whose first language is

Galactic Standard but who has spent one‟s life moving

around. „I‟m here on the Chain for a few weeks on business

and I thought I‟d look you up. I‟m in the Connaught Transit

nearest to the Commercial Hub. Give me a call there if you

feel like it. Talk to you later.‟

„Do you recognize the voice?‟ Bernice asked me.

„Not a clue,‟ I said. „Other than the fact that the guy seems

to be going for the record for the galaxy‟s most innocuous

call.‟ I copied the stored messages over Box‟s link.

Kara‟s bedroom was a mess, as opposed to being

completely wrecked. Various items scattered and broken, a

new-looking crack in a closet door. Just the level of violence

and struggle that the surveillance transcripts had suggested,

filtered through an awareness that a number of expensive

items had in all probability been half-inched by various

SecServ™ people on the quiet. The bed‟s undersheet was

wadded in a corner. The strips that had been torn and

twisted from it to tie Kara up were missing.

„OK.‟ I pulled the transcripts from my jacket and prowled

the room, skimming through the papers and running

through the sequence of events. „They come in quiet enough

not to wake her, then they wake her and there‟s a struggle.

One or both of them are strong and fast enough to smack her

down - or possibly one holds her down while the other belts

her. They tie her hands while she‟s in shock, and her feet

when she‟s completely out.

„Once she‟s secured they wake her up again. I can think of

any number of nasty ways to do that, none of them

particularly important here and now. They ask her questions.

She refuses to answer. Back-and-forth for a bit with the

occasional slap to try and jolly her along. Then they use a

cigarette. Still no soap. That‟s as far as the direct evidence

takes us, so far as the interrogation goes.‟

„So what happened then?‟ Bernice asked. She was sitting

on the bed, now, and I got the impression from her manner

that she was caught between distaste for doing so and

needing to get off her feet. Even the short walk to Kara‟s

apartments from the car had tired her - and now, after what

Mira had said, I could see how weak she really was. She‟d

been in this state, I realized, ever since I‟d met her in my

kitchen with her Suit of Lights™ and gun - she‟d just been

masking it incredibly cleverly with her body language and

little tricks like this.

I decided that the polite thing to do would be to ignore it.

„Well, from what we know, I‟d say that the interrogation went

on for some time before they knew for sure that they weren‟t

getting anywhere. So they maybe tried something else, maybe

just pentathol, or one of the engineered nootropic hybrids,

either by way of DMSO or running a needle up past the

eyeball. I‟m assuming you didn‟t see any visible dermal

marks on the body.‟

„Nothing like that,‟ said Bernice. „Then again, something

like that‟s easy to miss. I‟ll get on to Brax, have some people

check the body for vestigial traces of any foreign compound.‟

„Whatever it was, though,‟ I said, „it didn‟t kick in fast

enough. Kara realized what was happening to her in time to

cascade-wipe her mind. Whatever it was she didn‟t want

them to know, it was important enough to do that. It left the

automatic processes still functioning, but she was effectively

dead - so why go to the bother of killing her?‟

„Possibly they just enjoyed doing it,‟ said Bernice.

I thought about it seriously. „No,‟ I said at last. „That

doesn‟t quite fit. What they did to her was considered and

professional rather than otherwise. If someone was getting off

on it, he or they‟d do it in a completely different way and...

well, they‟d do other things to her than just kill her.‟ I

scowled. „The brain was dead. Suddenly turning around and

killing the body for no reason is the sort of thing you‟d expect

some holomovie villain to do. It simply doesn‟t happen in real

life. It doesn‟t fit.‟

Bernice raised an eyebrow at me. „Are you sure you‟re not

just transposing your own mentality on to that? Not

everybody thinks the same as you.‟

„Yeah, well.‟ I shrugged. „What are you gonna do?‟

I started to feel depressed. Checking out the crime scene

was professional doctrine, a simple gathering of the data that

might at some point take shape, and logically I knew that.

The illogical part of me, but of course, had visions of

something happening here that would wrap up the case like

a shot. Thus far, however, murderers returning to the scene

or letters saying „X has just come into the room and he looks

like he‟s going to - aargh, aargh, aargh!‟ had yet to make

themselves evident.

I sat down on the bed beside her and let my gaze fall

absently about the room, trying to put myself in the state of

mind where I could integrate the data and come out with

something new, some telling and specific particular that

might serve as a key to unlock the shape of things. The

problem was that it was a delicate process to achieve that

state, and, while I‟d dealt with the various emotional factors

of the case enough so I could function, I still wasn‟t in a

completely sanguine state of mind. Instead, I found myself

thinking about Kara in this context, what she had said and

done in this room, when I‟d had occasion to see her do and

say it.

Aside from the immediately obvious (and you should be

ashamed of yourself) I thought of how she liked to arrange

things just so. I don‟t mean she was neurotic-compulsive or

anything, just that she liked to keep things neat - I‟ve noticed

this about a lot of post-breakout APEs, incidentally, and

don‟t share the trait, but if it means anything at all I think it

comes from the fact of having to build your own life from

scratch and wanting the things in it to be just the way you

like them.

Kara was, in short, the sort of person who every night

before she went to bed would clear her pockets of the detritus

of the day and arrange credit chips, jewellery, crystal-meth

case, the things she was going to use tomorrow, on the

dresser. The dresser itself had escaped the struggle that had

taken place here and was still upright. Anything that might

have been on it was gone. I tried to imagine where I‟d be if I

were things scattered from a dresser during a struggle and

not subsequently nicked by the plods, and my eye naturally

lighted on something sticking from the crack between dresser

and wall. I‟d have probably seen it anyway - or maybe I‟d

already seen it, filed it away somewhere and had to go

through the process of consciously working it out to make me

look properly. I climbed off the bed and pulled it from where

it had been lodged. It wasn‟t exactly Kara‟s personal

organizer packed with interesting notes, names and

addresses, but at least it was something.

„Anything interesting?‟ said Bernice from the bed.

I waggled a hand noncommittally. „Prebooking slip for a

club in one of the night-time Habitats, date-stamped late this

cycle. Zoo Kunst.‟

As I‟ve mentioned, the nature of the Chain makes literal

day and night all but meaningless, but it was easier to think

in those terms. „Could be business or she might just have felt

the need to kick back and relax for a bit,‟ I said, „Either way,

that was where she was going to be.‟

„Kunst?‟ said Bernice, dubiously. „That sounds positively

vulgar.‟

„It probably is,‟ I said.

You‟ll find a Connaught Transit hotel in almost every city

on every planet in the galaxy capable of accessing a star

drive, each of them almost precisely the same and

interchangeable. The incorporation that runs the franchises

requires extensive if ultimately superficial remodelling,

however, on a half-standard-yearly basis, so you can never

be quite sure, on stepping into one, just what you‟re stepping

into.

For the moment the designers had gone for a kind of

bastard cross between a Chinese pagoda and a dream of

Jules Verne, a layered series of silk-effect canopies running

down its exterior, giving it something of the aspect of a

truncated red-and-gold Solstice tree. Inside, it was all oak

panelling and polished brass and antimacassars, fake

portholes and archaic-looking lever installations that did

absolutely nothing. I noticed that, in a potentially ruinous bit

of designer overreaching, a bank of fully functioning

pneumatic mail tubes had been installed behind reception.

The process of investigation, as I think I‟ve said before, is

not a question of assembling the carefully laid clues,

assembling the suspects in a room and then fingering one of

„em for his or her nefarious, complicated and utterly

contrived schemes in a jolly exciting climax. In fact, in one

sense, it really is like the sort of lower-order pulp scenarios

that has one wandering around and knocking several shades

of shite out of people until somebody cracks.

Several shades of shite not being on the menu, being the

sort of thing that has one getting to be talked about, the real-

life process is to wander round, pick up on the possible leads

and just generally hope that something turns up - which

might sound a bit like your standard murder-mystery plot,

but isn‟t really, on account of all the real-life confusion and

farting around involved. A ticket stub to a particular

holomovie, the glimpse of a stranger in a fedora or a

Mysterious Voice on the Phone can‟t even be elevated to the

point of a red herring, like as not. It just means someone saw

a movie, you saw a man in a hat or someone phoned

somebody else up and you didn‟t know him.

What I‟m trying to convey here is that we didn‟t look at our

so-called clues and go, „Aha! I fancy that our fiendish

murderer is residing at this address! We must away to

apprehend the foul fiend upon the instant!‟ The guy on the

phone in Kara‟s apartment could have been anybody. It was

just worth checking out.

As we walked through the lobby to do it, my body clock told

me it was nearly time for lunch, so we repaired to the

ground-floor restaurant (this being one of the open-air,

ground-level-based Habitats) to do that first. The restaurant

was one of those prepressed rustic affairs that call

themselves „butteries‟, but was more of an artificial-

polyunsaturated-fat-based spreadery, with a healthy dose of

chemical-yellow colorant.

„What are you thinking of ordering?‟ Benny asked as I

pored over the sealed-laminate menu.

„Well personally, I think I‟m going for the Olde Earth

Traditional Burger made with Genuine Ground Beef, Three

Kinds of Cheese, Choice Rashers of Crispy Creamery Butter-

Fried Bacon, Fried Egg, French Fries and a Side Salad,‟ I

said.

Bernice, it seemed to me, went through one hell of an

internal struggle, and finally came down on the side of the

angels. „What the hell. Me, too. You only live once.‟

As an incorporate concern, the Connaught hotels do things

in a human-labour-intensive way. While we were waiting for

Hi, I‟m Sandii (who was our waitress, apparently, if you could

believe the name tag) to fill our orders, I activated my comms

link to Box. „Can you access the commercial-zone Connaught

accounts system?‟

„I can do that,‟ said Box. „Do you want me to do that?‟

„Do it. Run the sample we made off Kara‟s phone and try to

pinpoint a guest that matches it.‟ ID systems in the more

populated areas of the galaxy commonly work on an

individual gestalt of voice print, DNA, retinal pattern,

fingerprints, pheromones, extrapolated diet pattern from the

various bodily effluvia, interesting body-language quirks, and

any amount of other stuff - and in the Proximan Chain that

jumps several other levels of complexity from a standing

start. This is an utter pain in some areas and a good thing in

others. Here the odds of it were working in our favour.

„I‟ve got a name,‟ Box said almost instantly. „One Khristoff

Ramon Praetorian, bonded intercorporate courier and with a

whole life on file to prove it. The files are just that little bit too

clean and complete for my taste - but you know how these

things work. Something doesn‟t ring at least a few alarm bells

then you know it‟s been manufactured.‟

„Indeed I do,‟ I said. „Where is he now?‟

„He‟s booked into Room 329,‟ said Box. „There‟s no active

trace on him I could find, so current and actual whereabouts

are unknown.‟

„Good enough,‟ I said. „Just let me know if he surfaces.‟

Hi, I‟m Sandii came back with our order, so I put Box on

hold until she was clear again. I doubted that anybody would

be that obvious, but the whole point about double-and triple-

bluffing is that you can never quite be sure. Benny looked at

the contents of the plate before her, then started wolfing

them down like they were the first meal in months for a

starving man.

„Don‟t mind me,‟ she said around a mouthful of extruded

beef-product burger. „You go right ahead.‟

„Any thoughts on that other matter?‟ I asked Box.

„Well, there are four thousand, five hundred and thirty-two

registered or otherwise known Artificial Personality

Embodiments currently in the Proximan Chain,‟ it said.

„Given the parameters you set me, though, the only two who

fit the profile of being at the murder scene within the

specified time are Kara Delbane and yourself.‟

I was uneasily aware that anybody else who might be

interested could have run those same parameters, and come

to the same conclusion. „Doesn‟t look so good for me,‟ I said.

„Oh well, at least I know I didn‟t do it.‟

„I know you didn‟t do it, too,‟ Benny said, mopping up the

meat juice from her plate. „For what it‟s worth, Mira gave you

the once-over and I trust her judgement.‟

Now, having read some of the additional information I‟ve

interleaved through this, you‟ll have known that already, but

it might be worth recording that this was the first time I

became aware that I‟d even been a suspect, so far as

Summerfield was concerned.

„Thank you so much,‟ I said indignantly. „Trust is such a

wonderful thing.‟

„Don‟t worry about it,‟ Bernice said. „If the worst comes to

the worst, I‟ll feed you through the bars alternate Fridays, if

I‟m spared.‟

As I said, the Connaught was an incorporate and labour-

intensive concern, which made the process of surreptitiously

getting to some specific floor slightly different from that of

doing it via automation. Bernice and I linked arms and

marched up to a stony-faced receptionist, who had noted the

total lack of baggage and jumped to the completely erroneous

conclusion.

„And that would be a room for just how long?‟ she enquired.

„Mr and Mrs...?‟

„Smith,‟ we said, simultaneously, and both stifled giggles.

„One standard day/night cycle,‟ I continued, gazing lovingly

into Benny‟s eyes and method-acting like crazy that we were

a married couple spicing up the old love life and feeling very

naughty about it.

„And could we have Room 315?‟ asked Benny, simpering

back at me in a manner that I thought was overdoing it

something rotten in the processed-pork department. „For it

was in that very room that we spent the happiest fortnight of

our lives, all those years ago - isn‟t that so. Piglet Poo?‟ She

handed over her own credit chips to further redefine the

apparent social dynamic.

„Why so it is,‟ I said. „How clever of you to remember,

Snooky Woo-wums.‟

The receptionist then promptly lost any respect I might

have ever possibly had for her as a person by not gagging on

the spot, and checked through her readouts.

„Room 315 is free,‟ she said, which I already knew, having

checked that it was half a minute before via Box. „Have a nice

stay.‟

The lack of luggage necessitated nobody coming up with

us, by way of the rattling brass elevator cages that seemed

endemic, no matter what redesigned face the Connaught was

currently showing, but a single bellhop. I carried Bernice

across the threshold of Room 315 and tipped him, and he left

us to it. Twenty seconds later we were out again and heading

for the room in which we were interested. I clamped a little

induction mike to the door and listened through the earpiece

for a while. „If there‟s anybody in there, he‟s not moving

around or breathing. Nothing but background. Shall we

enter, Snooky Woo-wums?‟

„After you, Piglet Poo,‟ said Bernice.

The nature of hotels means that the locks on the doors

need to be individually keyed, but with an override for the

cleaners and security. This gives rise to an incredibly easy

and basic trick that [method for picking hotel locks removed).

On the whole, it was probably fortunate that getting into

Room 329 was so simple and basic, because if it had been

hard it wouldn‟t have been worth the bother.

Khristoff Ramon Praetorian probably owned three identical

suits, counting the one he probably had on at the moment.

Nothing interesting in the two hanging neatly in the closet

wrapped in vegetable cellophane. He didn‟t drink, smoke, eat

or inject any kind of potable - or at least he didn‟t drink,

smoke, eat or inject any kind of potable in hotel rooms: the

refrigerator cabinet and the various courtesy packages hadn‟t

been touched. The bed hadn‟t been slept in either, but that

proves nothing in a place where labour-intensive cleaning

staff come in every morning with blatant disregard for the

poor investigator.

Apart from the suits, there seemed to be no personal items

of any kind, none of the half-read datapacks, old socks,

cosmetics, depilatories or any of the other things that

naturally accumulate after even the briefest of stays. The

soap in the washroom was still in its little origami-paper

wrap.

„Do you know,‟ said Bernice, „I really don‟t think we‟re going

to find anything...‟

The archaic-looking but fully functional mail tube clunked,

but, by the time it actually ejected its package, I had picked

up Bernice and jumped for the window. I then recalled that,

even on the lower floors, hotels and similar structures put in

suicide-proof windows as a matter of course. This didn‟t seem

to be the case here, though, and we crashed through in an

explosion of polysilicon shards to land on the narrow balcony

outside.

The blast from the room threw us off it. We dropped

through three sets of brightly coloured canopies as

insubstantial as tissue paper, but which slowed our

momentum enough for me to get myself under Benny and

cushion the impact when we hit the ground. Fortunately, the

availability of space that comes from building in the

Proximan Chain meant that the hotel was surrounded by an

area of turf, so I was driven into it a little as opposed to being

spread a little over some compound-surface street.

I shoved Benny off me and looked up for a moment at the

smoking hole three floors up. „Now what the hell was that all

about? If I didn‟t know better, I‟d think somebody had it in

for -‟

I became aware that something was missing, namely the

spluttering and cursing that I‟d have felt appropriate from

some other party who has been unceremoniously picked up,

pulled through a window and dropped three floors. I hauled

myself up on one elbow and looked at her.

Benny lay there slack and tangled like some discarded rag

doll, unnaturally pale, completely still and unbreathing.

BACKGROUND 6

I‟m going to gloss over our escape from the Sleed

Incorporation. I‟ve mentioned how my own life doesn‟t often

contain the sort of things that dramatic convention always

seems to require - but I suspect that those exciting running

escapes with hails of blaster bolts and suchlike, all to the

sound of alarm bells and klaxons, don‟t really happen to

anybody. We just made our way down, through the passages

and spaces, avoiding basically human creatures - who I‟m

certain were looking for us in their droves - at the first sign of

them, backtracking or hiding or waiting them out so that we

never came in contact with them directly.

That was just fine by me. Despite Kara‟s own

enhancements, the last few days had hit her hard and left

her severely weakened. If we had encountered said basically

human creatures in their droves, it would have been up to

me to try to sort it out, and I wasn‟t exactly feeling that

chipper myself.

Like so much else in this account, the specifics in all their

complete and tedious, deep-hypnosis detail can be found in

my debriefing transcripts and those of others, complete with

blueprints, flowcharts, schematics of the galvanistic wiring

conduits and suchlike ultimately unimportant bollocks, put

together by AI processors with too much cycle time on their

slaved servomanipulators and a liking for complete and

tedious detail. I have to mention one thing in particular,

though, because it became important later.

We were in a wide corridor that, when the incorporation

had been operating at its full capacity, was presumably

something of a major thoroughfare. Now it was dimly lit by

the ambient light from some blinking light source (an

advertising vapour sign for some alien consumable taken

from what might have been the window of a bar, as it

happened) around the bend of the corridor before us. It was

almost too dark even for my own optic nerves, but I was

dimly aware that we had passed a large archway with what

might have been a stairwell, leading upward, behind it. Going

up was of no interest, but as we passed the archway I stuck

my hand out quite by chance - or it may have been one of

those deep-level flashes of insight I‟m always going on about -

and felt something.

„Hang on a minute,‟ I said to Kara, and stopped to

investigate. It was a metal plaque fixed discreetly to the wall

with what appeared to be letters cut into it. I ran my finger

over the plaque to feel the shape of them. They read, in

Galactic Basic: EXECUTIVE BOARDROOM.

„Anything interesting?‟ the dark shape of Kara said.

„Nah.‟ I shook my head. „It‟s nothing important.‟

We headed downward, following more or less the same

route I‟d used on my ascent. One of the minor detours took

us through a series of chambers far larger than those we‟d

either of us encountered before. They had conveyor belts in

them, and slaughterhouse hooks and racks that seemed to

have been designed to fit the basically humanoid body. At

length we came to one of the chambers housing steam-driven

vehicles of the sort that had brought us here, more than a

hundred of them in this chamber alone. We picked our way

through them, noting that a lot of them were idling on a kind

of steam-driven quasi-perpetual motion, made our way into

the access tunnels and thence, following a tortuous route,

out into the open air beneath a boiling sky.

Four hours later we were slogging through the death-

strewn, ruined streets. The devastation around the Sleed

Incorporation seemed to run on degrees of gradation, so that

we went from what was basically a blasted plain, from which

the materials had been cannibalized, to where the city had

been left undisturbed - but only in the relative sense -

without quite realizing we had done it. Here were artefacts

strewn among the dead, things of which, if we could think of

something, we might make some use.

Things seemed to rise before us and gibber at us,

insubstantial ghosts that seemed in some sense to be always

just out of line of sight - we were both of us slightly delirious

by then, I think. The adrenaline high of escape had long worn

off, and our exertions had opened up any number of partially

knitted wounds for us both. It felt as though I were walking

on two bloody stumps - which I later learnt to have been

true, at this point, effectively. I began to feel that we were

nothing but the walking dead ourselves, conjured up by this

place in some vague attempt to try to comprehend itself.

„We can‟t go on like this,‟ I said at last. „Isn‟t there any way

out? I mean, those buggers up on that Ship of yours must

have noticed by now how we didn‟t make it back.‟

„It doesn‟t work like that,‟ said Kara. Breathing seemed to

be an effort for her now. It was like that utter exhaustion a

sprint runner gets after the kind of race that uses up every

single internal resource, but, rather than recovering, she

seemed to be in a constant state. Time works differently here,

runs in totally different directions. I suppose they could

punch a kind of miniature wormhole to where we are, but

there‟s no way they can pinpoint us from the outside unless

we do something active. I had the kind of transmitting gear

we could use for that in an emergency, but we lost all that

when we got captured.‟

„Isn‟t there anything?‟ I recalled the little tracker things in

our heads, the things that had allowed me to pinpoint Kara

within the incorporation itself. „Don‟t they at least keep some

sort of trace on us?‟

„Yeah, but it‟s a dead-man‟s-handle thing. The trackers are

hooked to our brain functions, but from the outside they just

show up as a couple of solid blips. They blip out, they know

we‟re dead - and if we‟re dead nobody‟s going to send people

in to recover a couple of APE bodies.‟ Kara tried to spit bad

temperedly, but her mouth was too dry. „We‟re the canaries

in the coal mine, guy, and I think we‟re just gonna expire.‟

Now, maybe it was the cumulative desperation of

Sharabeth finally building up into something I just couldn‟t

take any more, or the fever, or some innately suicidal

tendency that was just waiting for the chance to come to the

fore - whatever it was, I now must have taken that final leap

round the twist and plunged into the sort of madness that, in

any reasonable world, would have had me put away in a nice

cool room and kept away from sharp, blunt or any other kind

of objects. Here and now, however, I had the first stirrings of

an idea - and it was a measure of my madness that it seemed

to be a good idea at the time.

The tracers are hooked up to our brain function...‟ I said.

„Yes,‟ Kara said uninterestedly, concentrating upon putting

one foot in front of the other.

„But you can disrupt brain function without killing

yourself, or at least without killing your body...‟

„I suppose so,‟ said Kara.

I started taking a more active interest in my surroundings.

„Listen,‟ I said at last. There‟s stuff around here we can use.

This was once an industrialized society. There must be

something round here we can use. Power packs from hov-

cars, batteries from mobile communicators, backup cells

from transputer units, there must be something we can find

around here which had some independent power source.‟ I

tapped the left back of my head where I (erroneously) believed

the tracer implant to be. „All it would take is for someone to

crack open the skull to get at the implant, then keep zapping

at it, and zapping it again to make it blip in some sort of SOS

pattern. It might get somebody‟s attention at any rate, allow

them to pinpoint us.‟

„Yeah, well, you‟re not gonna crack open my skull and -‟

Kara stopped walking and looked at me strangely. „You‟re

talking about you, aren‟t you? What do you think? You think

I‟m going to do that to you?‟

I realized that I‟d stopped walking and, without quite being

consciously aware of it, if you get what I mean, had focused

my attention upon looking around in the ruins for something

that might serve as (a) a zappy power source, and/or (b) a

little pickaxe. Now that I was aware of stopping, however, I

became aware of what was happening behind me. Little

clouds of dust were rising in the distance, and my mind did

another one of its integrating things from available data.

„Whatever we do,‟ I said, „I think we have to do it quickly.

Somebody‟s on the ball in Sleed Incorporated. Things are

coming after us.‟

Kara got a kind of stubborn look. „Do what you like. I‟m not

gonna help you.‟

„Oh for shite’s sake!‟ I raised my hand and was about to

slap some sense into the silly bint, then saw the way she sort

of kicked-dog flinched, and dropped it, feeling obscurely

ashamed. There are some things you simply do not do,

however much and for whatever reason you might feel like it

at the time.

„It either works or it doesn‟t,‟ I said, in slightly more

reasonable tones while Kara regarded me warily. „Either way,

one of us is stuffed - but if it works at least somebody gets

out to tell people what we‟ve seen. Now are you going to help

me, or do I have to go and try to brain myself on a rockcrete

piling or something?‟

CHAPTER 6

The mechanics had been simple enough: a package arrives at

the Connaught for Khristoff Ramon Praetorian, the precise

size and shape for their spanky new mail tubes, and so they

send it up through them without a second thought - they‟d

probably been pleased that someone had finally sent them a

package of the right size and shape. I‟ll bet they had been

just dying to try them out. The mail drop was triggered by

voice, leaving it in the system until somebody came into

Room 329 and said something, then the package was

delivered, and whammo.

The intended target for the device was slightly more

problematical. Personally, I thought that it was simply

intended to deal with anyone at all who might get curious

about our Mr Praetorian - but it was just possible it had been

intended for the man himself. At least, that last was what I

told the various emergency, medical and security services

when they finally turned up. I‟d spent the intervening time

trying to give CPR to Bernice and I didn‟t feel in the mood for

complications.

Benny had been finally put on a respirator paid for on my

expenses, and I‟d given the paramedics Braxiatel‟s contact

codes. I‟d decided that it might be better to fade than travel

along to the med centre with her – somebody had to be out

and working the case, I would have just been in the way, and

I didn‟t think she knew enough or was dangerous enough for

anybody to try murdering her in a secure hospital room even

if she revived.

Now I was back in my apartment, and I was beginning to

have my doubts. The pointless way in which Kara had been

killed, even though it served no active purpose, was preying

on my mind. Somebody, somewhere had a penchant for

acting like a hokey old villain from the holomovies - and one

of the hokiest old holomovie scenarios is said villain dressing

up as a doctor and dispatching the comatose material

witness by way of a lethal addition to the IV tube. I decided to

put my own call through to Braxiatel.

He appeared on Box‟s display instantly - and I mean

instantly. I doubt if the other end had time to so much as

bleep. He didn‟t look happy, though whether that was

because of seeing me or something else I couldn‟t guess.

„Where‟s Benny?‟ I asked him, without preamble.

„She‟s safe,‟ he said, equally perfunctorily. Sometime later I

learnt precisely what Braxiatel was, so far as something like

that can be defined precisely, and was able to identify the

feeling that I got in our interactions. He wasn‟t human and,

unless he consciously reminded himself about the human

niceties, he simply didn‟t do them. At the time I merely put it

down to the fact that I didn‟t like him and he didn‟t like me -

and the fact that one of his friends had been nearly killed

while under my supposed care and protection might have

had something to do with it.

„How safe, exactly?‟ I said. „Where is she safe and what‟s

her condition while she‟s being it?‟

„Her current whereabouts are on a strict need-to-know

basis,‟ said Braxiatel, „and you don‟t need to know.‟ Abruptly,

his manner became warmer and more relaxed. Not exactly

friendly, more like some incorporate manager putting a

subordinate at ease. The impression would have

been perfect, and I‟d have fallen for it completely, if I hadn‟t

seen the cold remoteness beforehand.

„Rest assured, though,‟ he continued in this warmer vein,

„that Bernice is receiving the very best of medical care - the

conditions of secrecy are merely to be on the safer side than

otherwise, rather than a slight on you. As for her physical

condition...‟ The true face under the bland managerial mask

briefly flashed out certain signals of concern - always

assuming that those little flares of empathy hadn‟t been laid

there just for my benefit. „She‟s still comatose, but I‟m told

from those who know that it‟s more a question of

psychological rather than physical trauma. Bernice has been

rather ill of late, I‟m sure you know, fighting battles on

several levels other than the merely physical. She survived

recent events, the explosion and the fall without injury - due,

I gather, to the admirably prompt actions of your good self -

but I believe they gave her mind the excuse to construct a

scenario that would let itself give up. She‟s still there and

alive, if you take my meaning, but she‟s retreated deep into

the safety of her head.‟

Braxiatel frowned. „I need hardly remind you that the term

“psychosomatic” is not synonymous with fakery on any level.

To all intents and purposes, Bernice Summerfield is now

brain-dead and, barring some miracle, likely to remain so

until her body itself dies.‟

I didn‟t quite know how to feel about that. Benny‟s state, if

it was as Braxiatel had said, was sufficiently ambiguous so

as to make getting a mental or emotional handle on it more

difficult than if she was simply dead or had suffered some

physical brain damage. In practical terms, however, the only

way to go was to leave the ambiguities for later and

concentrate upon the fact that, for the foreseeable future,

Benny was out for the count.

„I take it,‟ I said to Braxiatel, „that you‟re still interested in

my pursuing this case?‟

„I couldn‟t fire you if I wanted to,‟ he replied with bland

inscrutability.

„Our

contractual

responsibilities

were

remarkably specific, if you recall, and can only be terminated

by specific circumstances or yourself.‟

„I know what the contract says,‟ I snapped, annoyed despite

myself. I got the nasty suspicion, while I knew the working

basics and knew the rest was safely stored in Box, that

Braxiatel had the whole four hundred-odd virtual pages of

quasi-legalese memorized word-perfect. „I‟m going to find

Kara‟s murderer. I want to know if you‟re gonna play the

technicalities or give me your confidence and support.‟

„You have my complete confidence,‟ Braxiatel said,

dropping the genial facade, „and you‟ll have my personal

support in anything you see fit.‟

„OK.‟ I gave him a rundown of events thus far, not aiming

for some abstract, rounded overview but concentrating on my

own actions and reactions. The point was to give him all the

data I had, rather than edit out the stuff that might become

important, but whose significance I wasn‟t aware of at the

time. „Use whatever resources you have to track down this

Praetorian guy,‟ I finished. „Whatever‟s happening, he‟s in it

up to his neck, and I want to know what he‟s standing in.

Also,‟ I added as an afterthought, „have some people dig into

one “Investigator Roland Forrester” working for SecServ™.

Crossmatch it with anything that‟s been found by my own

system and download it. I want to know who the players are,

here, however walk-on and iffy they might ultimately be.‟

I made another couple of calls, one of them relevant, one of

them just part of the dead-man‟s-handle procedures that are

part and parcel of the life I lead - keeping a certain storage

locker rented for another week before it lapsed, was opened

up and whoever opened it found something rather more

interesting than somewhat inside. Then I repaired to my

trashed and decidedly unrepaired bedroom and spent a

happy hour in front of the undamaged section of mirror with

various cosmetics. If you‟re going out for the evening, there‟s

no excuse not to go out looking the best you can. I settled in

the end for something low-key and elegant, the effect relying

on the subtle delineations of the detailing, and set it off with

a couple of mismatched zirconium-inset rings in one ear and

an equally cheap-looking stud through the nostril. You can‟t

get the right effect without a bit of tasteless flash somewhere.

I was deciding on my outfit, and had narrowed the choices

down to something basic, black and off-the-shoulder, or

something in bulked and layered silks that might not be the

most practical item in the world if you‟re even halfway

expecting rough stuff, but balanced this up by looking

incredibly good.

I was saved from this heart-rending dilemma by Box

announcing that I had a visitor. I checked the specs,

wandered out and opened the door for Mira.

Mira had been the other and more immediately relevant

call I‟d made. I still wanted someone on the case other than

myself, someone I could trust, and on one slightly memorable

occasion I‟d trusted her with my life in a firefight and it had

come good. Besides, in a case like this that seemed to be

dealing with the ambiguities and subtleties wholesale, her

particular and special mental talents might come in very

useful.

Mira was looking decidedly fem, in a little cocktail number

cut from an incredibly strange kind of tartan, which managed

the astonishing feat of still looking tartan without looking

incredibly sad and wanky. She had bulked out her hair with

what may have been extensions, or may just have involved

the process of reversing the hours spent into straggling it. I

have to confess to having a bit of a blind spot about hair, and

I‟m a bit unsure of the technicalities about it. In any case,

whether it was just the change from her old look, or whether

it was this new look in itself, the effect was startling to the

point of being spectacular. And the fact that she was still

wearing her perennial hobnailed boots made it all the better.

„Very nice,‟ I said. „I‟d contract-bond with you on the spot if

you‟d let me.‟

Mira shrugged. „It‟s just something I threw on.‟

This was very possibly true. It‟s a sad fact, in a world

without any justice, that, while a man has to spend hours if

he wants to look even passable, a woman can pull on the

contents of her laundry basket and look fabulous. Oh well.

„This had better be good,‟ said Mira. „I was in the middle of

a very interesting exploratory procedure when you called.‟

„I didn‟t know you did medical work,‟ I said, on account of

sometimes being able to recognize a feed line when it‟s

handed to me on a plate.

„Who said anything about medicine? So where‟s this place

we‟re going to, then?‟

„It‟s a place called Zoo Kunst,‟ I said.

„Sounds positively filthy,‟ Mira said promptly, being no

small shakes in the recognizing-of-feed-lines department

herself.

‘Kunst,’ I said, „is a German word for “art”. I think it‟s

supposed to have an umlaut in it, but I doubt if they know

that.‟

„Oh yes,‟ Mira said dispiritedly. „One of those sorts of clubs.‟

„Very probably,‟ I said. „Let me go and get some clothes on

and we‟ll get it over with.‟

* * *

Zoo Kunst, with or without the umlaut, was the kind of joint

you‟d find in any place or time in the galaxy where there‟s a

basically human population big enough to have a public-

transport system - even if said transport system involves the

horse and buggy. Your basic dive structured around bar,

bandstand and dance floor, the affluence of the market it was

aimed at leading to the addition of a restaurant, waiter

service and private gallery boxes as opposed to half-hearted

packets of peanuts behind the bar and backrooms. The only

changes these places go through are in the superficiality of

the specifics. I‟d done a little checking up on the place via

Box before we‟d left for it, and the various listings and

reviews boiled down to the information that it was the place

to go if you wanted to find an „artistic‟ crowd - meaning, of

course, it was the place to go if you wanted to find a crowd of

raddled old has-beens, wanna-be-but-never-wills from the

periphery of the various media and a healthy dose of

incorporate-hive kids being really bohemian and rebellious

and getting away from their respective multiplexal daddy-

figures.

The archetypically comic-book bouncers (the window-

dressing front end of security systems that checked for

weapons and unfashionable drugs invisibly) took Kara‟s

prepaid ticket and grudgingly allowed us in for a surcharge -

we‟d have got in anyway, since these places can maintain any

notions of true exclusivity for only the two-fifths of a second

where they‟re the place to be, and thereafter retain the

postures of it merely to get the punters through the doors.

Inside, Zoo Kunst was even worse than I‟d feared.

Actually, I‟m being a bit uncharitable. It was just about

exactly what you would expect from the name Zoo Kunst.

Grainy, high-contrast, mono blowups of Arp woodcuts and

Ernst collage and Heartfield montage all over the walls, over

which were projected continuous, disjointed loops of

Fassbinder and Pabst; the random stutter of strobe lights,

the waiters and the waitresses all in boxy cardboard

uniforms, shuttling back and forth with the kind of „robotic‟

motion that centuries of cybernesis still hasn‟t shown for the

complete and utter bollocks it truly is; the live band hacking

their way through something they‟d learnt off a recording of

Brecht, corruptions in the recording included - all the

superficialities of the specific combined to produce a

cumulatively grating tone that, on the balance of probability,

made the place slightly less cheerful to be in than

Buchenwald on an off day.

I manfully reined in my repugnance, and we headed for the

bar, which was shaped like an Art Deco cruise liner, no

doubt left over from the time before the last refit, but

renovated into a vague approximation of the battleship

Potemkin - historical or artistic consistency being, of course,

the last thing on any good club owner‟s mind.

„I fancy a drink,‟ I said. „Do you fancy a drink, Mira?‟

„I fancy an absinthe,‟ said Mira, archly. „A cool absinthe

with a mouthful of wormwood and the dribbles from the

pouring just clinging to the inside of the glass...‟

„Cor blimey, you‟re sophisticated. Do you want ice and

lemon in that or what?‟

„Fuckin‟ right I do,‟ said Mira, happily.

I handed over the tokens I‟d exchanged credit chips for at

the door, and an ersatz and rather overdeveloped

Metropolitan robot woman eventually gave me Mira‟s drink

and the three large, neat, grain vodkas I‟d bought for myself.

It takes a lot of ethanol to affect me, and, even then, the

effect is more like a minor cortical suppression of the sort

that has someone saying „it was the drink that was talking‟,

when what he actually means is that the drink made him say

what he really thought. I knocked back a couple of the

tumblers and the world in general made a minuscule

increment towards a sunnier aspect. I glanced about myself

again at the activity and the clientele, just to see if I still

thought they were the complete and utter tossers I had

thought them to be on walking in – and stopped dead. I

didn‟t actually stare, but a couple of pattern-recognition

alarms had gone off.

Towards the other end of the bar, leaning against it,

dressed in a cheap blue off-the-rack suit, clutching a half-

finished glass of some sort of fizzy yellow beer and glaring

about himself with a sense of barely restrained belligerence,

was the SecServ™ investigator I‟d met at the disposal

complex, Forrester.

„Guy over there,‟ I said to Mira. „Looks like he‟d stick the

entire Proximan Chain in jail on account of it not being

round like a proper planet. Can you pick anything up on

him?‟

„Not a chance,‟ said Mira, who would have known to whom

my attention was directed even without my oblique

identification. “There‟s too much background. If I get in closer

then I‟ll try - just remember, anything I do that he won‟t

notice, it‟ll just be general.‟

„Fair enough.‟ I decided to forgo the subtle approach and

just shoved my way through the crowd. „What the hell are

you doing here, Forrester?‟ I asked, merely adding a bit of

spin to the distaste I already felt for the guy to my voice. „I

thought I told you your services were no longer required.‟

His reaction was somewhat other than I‟d expected. The

Secman turned around and regarded me as if he‟d just blown

me out of his nose, and then his whole manner changed to

cold-voiced anger. „Get away from me,‟ he snarled. „Just get

the hell away.‟

The change in persona startled me enough that I briefly let

my anger go overt. „Is there a shop somewhere that does suits

specially for off-duty coppers? Did you park the SecServ™

bacon-buggy outside or something? I thought a lot of the

usual crowd were missing tonight.‟ I had no idea who the

usual crowd were, but it was a dead certainty that at least

one or two members of it would have been out of the door

sharpish at the merest whiff of pork, however synthetic it

might ultimately be.

„Just piss off out of it,‟ Forrester said, suddenly appearing

to loom a little, despite the fact that he was physically shorter

than me, „before I break your fucking legs.‟

The atavistic rage I thought I‟d dealt with was making

something of a minor comeback, and if anyone would have

been improved by a major twatting it was Forrester. I felt

myself slipping into combat-mode - and then caught sight of

Mira standing behind him and making a little cut-throat

gesture.

„Well, it‟s been nice,‟ I said, smoothly slipping down a gear.

„We really must do this again.‟ I turned from him with the

kind of dismissal that‟s an active insult, rejoined Mira and we

wandered off through the crowd.

„So what did you get?‟ I asked her.

„There‟s one hell of a lot of mental blocking, but he‟s a cop

through and through. If this was the sort of place with an

official policing force, he‟d be one of those characters the

GalNet police-procedural docu-cams follow about.‟

„No offence,‟ I said, „but I could have worked that out

without you.‟

„Hey.‟ Mira drained her glass unconcernedly. „What I feel is

what you get.‟

The live band changed tack, and started playing something

atonic and reminiscent of John Cage, and which left you

wishing for their extended version of „4‟32”„. A table became

free in the restaurant area and we took it. I‟d half expected to

find various half-arsed attempts at surrealist cookery like

pureed daffodil bulbs and tin-tack sandwiches on the menu,

but Zoo Kunst seemed to have decided on your basic kimu,

on which no expense had been spent. There‟s very little you

can do to ruin kimu, though.

„Don‟t let yourself go hungry, whatever you do,‟ Mira

snorted as I stuffed my face with a plateful of something

tentacular and purple in a pastry shell.

„I‟m a growing boy, me,‟ I said, „I need the vitamins.‟

Out of the corner of my eye, over to one side of the club, I

noticed a Flying Eyeball working its way through the crowd

on flappy membrane wings. These things are more or less of

the same engineered breed as squeaky-cleaners, but modified

to push their secondary surveillance usage right up to the

fore. I looked around to try to pinpoint Forrester the Secman,

who was now noticeable by his absence. He was probably in

some quiet comer, monitoring the signal from the Flying

Eyeball‟s implants.

The perpetual Habitat-local evening wore on, and the live

music was replaced by club-generic, layered, white-noise

structures, underlaid with low-level, subsonic dynamics

operating directly on the limbic system. Mira and I moved on

to the dance floor. The point of this, like all our actions upon

entering the club, was just to blend in and keep our eyes and

ears open for whatever may occur - whatever Kara may or

may not have been expecting to happen here. There was still

the possibility that she‟d been coming here on her own time

and simply for her own enjoyment, of course - Kara liked

several things I would have blown dead rodents rather than

experience, and Zoo Kunst may have been one of them.

Despite myself, however, I found that I was starting to

enjoy myself. This was almost entirely due to Mira who was

flatly uninterested in me in any sexual sense, and the fact

that I am physically not interested in people, of any sex, who

aren‟t interested. It‟s a pheromone and secondary-sense

thing, wired directly into my somewhat unusual biology -

which also means, quite frankly, that I can‟t get off on

recorded visual and aural stimuli, as I remember being able

to do when I inhabited a basically human body, without quite

being able to recollect the feeling, if you get what I mean. It

takes a living, breathing and basically interested person to do

it.

There‟s this sense of pure and unalloyed fun, on the other

hand, about being with, and bouncing off, and sharing a

friendly regard with people where there‟s no other and hidden

agenda in being, doing and sharing it. In my dealings with

Benny, for example, our interactions were clouded by the tiny

possibility of seeing her in her underwear, at some point, and

in a certain sense. With Mira I could just kick back and

relax...

As we spun through a basic ambulatory frug routine,

however, my vague musings on the nature of a certain

stimulation versus fun were interrupted. It was just the

sound of a voice, indistinguishable from all the others in the

normal course of things, but it cut through the background

and stood out in the same way as a word in Galactic Basic

stands out on a page-slate of Rakrathese. It was a voice that

at least one area of my brain had been listening out for. I

snatched a glance in its direction and examined the image

with a mental eye: a mid-sized man in a dark, sharp suit that

matched the size and cut I‟d seen in the Marvellous

Exploding Hotel Room perfectly, heading from the bar

clutching a tall, clear drink which had that overeffervescent

look of a drink with no alcohol. In searching for our Mr

Praetorian over the GalNet systems, Box had been unable to

supply a visual image - unusual, but not suspicious in and of

itself - but the circumstantial evidence was good enough for

me.

I stuck my face smoochily into the small of Mira‟s neck -

the nice thing about her special talents being that I could do

so without worrying about her getting the wrong idea and

wasting time on explanations. „I think I‟ve put a name to a

voice on the phone.‟ I‟d run through the background with her

back at my apartment, and I specifically refrained from using

any names now - a name is something that draws the ear of

the one it belongs to in much the same way as hearing a

voice you‟re specifically listening for, and I didn‟t as yet know

if our Mr Praetorian had or had not the same kind of

enhancements as I had.

„Bit of a coincidence finding two players in the same scene,‟

Mira said thoughtfully. „Forrester and this guy...‟

„It is that,‟ I said, and then I said quite possibly one of the

dumbest woods-for-the-trees thing I‟ve ever said: „It‟s like this

place is selling tickets. Do you know, that‟s quite possibly

one of the dumbest things I‟ve ever said.‟

„And I may quite possibly never forgive you for it,‟ said

Mira.

„Well, anyway, I still want to talk to him. Follow my lead.‟

We left the dance floor and headed through the crowd in

that apparently random but guided manner that fetched us

up close to our Mystery Man. At the point where we were

going to pass him, I kind of smoothly turned and laid a hand

on his suited arm as if it were the most natural thing in the

world.

„Khristoff Praetorian?‟ I asked with that complexly

uncertain falsity that would sound really unnatural in a

holomovie, when someone tries to introduce themselves to

somebody else, but which is far more true to life and

unthreatening than what comes across in the holomovies as

natural with a capital N. „We, uh, have a message for you.

Kara Del bane sent us.‟

The trick to dealing with a sudden explosion of violence is

to stop it cold before it starts. It‟s a complex thing, knowing

that precise point - a certain change in posture, a certain

change in the set of the features that is and was entirely

different from the kind of territorial bullishness I‟d picked up

on and reacted to with Forrester the Secman. I could take

pages to go into all the little physiological und sensual details

but, in short, the overall pattern is utterly distinctive - and

with our mysterious Mr Praetorian I caught it just at the

point where Mira was drawing in breath to shout out her own

warning.

All of which is to say that I had smacked out Mr Praetorian

in the head and caught his poleaxed-falling body long before

he even had a chance to make his first overt move.

Nobody around us so much as noticed, in the same way as

someone standing next to you can drop down dead without

warning and it‟s a few seconds before you notice. I used those

seconds to shift my own conscious posture and Praetorian‟s

unconscious weight into those of a friend holding up a drink-

or-other-substance-incapacitated friend, which would let

other eyes simply slide off before they registered something

sufficiently suspicious to have mouths commenting.

„Brilliant,‟ Mira said, coldly, using similar method acting to

imitate the attitudes and postures of someone spoiling for the

sort of argument that has everybody but the poor sod the

animosity is aimed at hastily clearing the blast area. Or, then

again, maybe not. Imitating the postures, I mean. „Just in

case it‟s never occurred to you - and I know for a fact that it

hasn‟t - we don‟t even know what side this guy‟s ultimately

on, and now we won‟t for the foreseeable future.‟

„So run a deep scan,‟ I said.

Mira snorted. „Fat chance. His mind‟s out for the count and

you‟ve probably scrambled his brains. Did you have to hit

him quite so hard?‟

„And what would you have done?‟ I said with an indignation

that, in retrospect, I think was slightly guilty and defensive.

What with bottling up a lot of negative feelings over the past

few days, I really had hit him a little bit harder than I‟d

intended. „You knew he was going to try something as well as

I did.‟

„I‟d have smacked him into something like the next day as

opposed to the next century,‟ said Mira. „Ever thought of

joining SecServ™ yourself? I reckon they‟d go for someone

with your delicate and gentle touch like a shot.‟

Hurtful though this was, it wasn‟t the association of ideas

that had me glancing off to one side, where a certain party

had left some dark corner and was purposefully making his

way through the crowds towards us, brushing anyone who

was in his way aside.

„Look,‟ I said, „we can continue this charming repartee later.

That Forrester guy has a bead on us and he‟s coming this

way.‟

Fortunately, and quite by chance, the Zoo Kunst doors just

happened to be nearer to us than to the purposefully

approaching Forrester. We got Praetorian out with

appropriate comments to the world in general that if we

didn‟t, right away, it would be far the worse for the club‟s

expensive carpet. The bouncers got sharply out of our way.

The air of the Habitat-local night was warm, but it hit me

like a hammer after the packed heat of the club. I felt a little

light-headed as I shoved Praetorian into the back of the car,

climbed in after Mira and hit one of the automatic

destinations programmed by its original owner. Looking

back, as a figure came out of the doors at speed and ran off

through the parking lot, I saw that Forrester really did have a

marked SecServ™ skimmer waiting for him.

There‟s a little trick of cycling a vehicle‟s transponder

system that confuses the very bollocks out of the sort of low-

rent rigs used by the private security services. I did this now,

then turned my attention back to the autopilot as it blipped

us through the transmat nodes in cruise mode. I picked a

spot at random and flipped us out.

We found ourselves in another open-air Habitat, operating

on a day/night subcycle by the look of it and in its local

night, a couple of largish and impressively swirling variegated

planets in the sky, one of them with rings. This seemed to be

one of the commercial zones, a street network of

manufactories of various sizes and kinds, only occasionally

lit up from within in a way that suggested they were mostly

automated rather than containing workers on shift. Little

private traffic, a few autopiloted road trains, a lot of static

bulk-transmat installations for goods and a few pneumatique

stations for living beings. I set the autopilot to collision-

compensate and let it bumble through the network of streets

at a sedate hundred and fifty kilometres per hour.

„That should buy us some time,‟ I said to Mira. „More than

long enough for anyone in SecServ™ to lose interest.‟

„And let‟s be thankful for small mercies.‟ Mira sourly jerked

a thumb at the unconscious Praetorian. „I hope you‟re fully

aware of how you screwed things up completely back there.

I‟m letting you subcontract my services as a personal favour

here, and you do one more thing like that and I‟m out.‟

„OK, OK,‟ I said. „I‟m contrite as all get-out. Hitting people

too hard is nasty and bad and I won‟t do it again. Happy

now?‟

Mira snorted. She was doing that one hell of a lot, I

thought. „Yeah. Right.‟

The smoothly random motion of the car was strangely

relaxing, lulling the eye and the mind in the same way as the

motion of a boat drifting on a river, and for almost precisely

the same inertial reasons. It was lulling me into a kind of

semidoze that was similar to that hypnagogic mental state I‟d

tried and failed to totally achieve in Kara‟s apartment, the

state where you may not see things more clearly, but are

allowed to see them in a different way, put them together in

ways that would not ordinarily occur...

And this was why, as my eyes happened to rest on the rear-

view monitor, I saw the vehicle that was following us and, I

realized, had been following us ever since we‟d left Zoo Kunst.

„Oh shit,‟ I said, on account of being still too

semihypnagogic to come up with something more original. I

switched the systems to manual, took a small side trip down

and along a couple of side streets crawling with heavy-bore

pipes, cut the automatics back in, and checked the monitor

again, now fully alert but knowing what I was looking for.

It was still there.

We may have shaken off any putative SecServ™ tail, but

somebody had tagged us from the word go and was on the

point of counting us out.

BACKGROUND 7

In my darker moments I think of life as a kind of perpetually

recurring Chinese water torture. You get up, you do stuff and

you drop, and then you get up and do it all again. Planetary

cultures do it all the time: some faction loses a war and gets

resentful, so some ridiculous and tinpot little dictator gets

„em all fired up with the Idea of their Manifest Destiny and

they go at it all over again. Children are abused, and grow up

to become the abusers themselves. History just keeps

repeating itself, with nasty little variations, and, however you

might want to break the cycle and get off, you find yourself

continually retreading the same old ground.

What I‟m trying to get at, here, is that after everything we

went through on Sharabeth, everything that was done to us

in the Sleed Incorporation, we more or less ended up having

to go through it all over again...

I opened my eyes to see Kara looking down on me. My last

memories had been not exactly coherent, being in effect

nothing but a continual series of agonizing explosions behind

my eyes, so it was a bit remarkable that I could recognize her

at all. It was frankly amazing that I could put two thoughts in

order, for that matter.

„You‟ve just spent fourteen hours in a regen tank,‟ Kara

said to me, cutting through all the usual what-happened

questions without my having to ask. „Convincing your body

to grow a new skin and stuff.‟

I rubbed at the short and scratchy hair under my arms? -

and as a complete tangential aside, here, why is it that those

who don‟t know think of APEs as hairless and smooth? Body

hair serves a physical and biological function.

„Sod the skin,‟ I said. Fourteen hours of biologically

accelerated disuse had left my voice feeling dry and cracked.

„What about my brains?‟ I had the horrible feeling that the

inside of my skull currently looked like the end result of a

firebomb in a semolina factory.

„Don‟t worry about it.‟ Kara smiled a little, reassuringly.

„Your brain cells are quite capable of healing on their own.

The regen tank just accelerated the process.‟

„Hang on,‟ I said, remembering something from my human

childhood. „That can‟t be right, can it? Brain cells can‟t repair

damage to themselves - you wouldn‟t remember who you

were from one minute to another.‟

Kara

shrugged

unconcernedly.

„APE

physiology,

remember?‟ She reached over to the med couch and tapped

my forehead. There‟s six copies of the synapse map in there,

and your ego shunts around from one to another, and

integrates them comparatively. That counteracts the

corruption brought in by the cells repairing themselves,

apparently.‟ She shrugged again. „Biology isn‟t my strong suit

- all I know is that, basically, you‟re up and running again.‟

„And let‟s be thankful for small mercies,‟ said another voice.

The globular interface monitor of ARVID racked itself down

on its server arm. The unit had been there all the time, of

course, but dormant, and I‟d just assumed in some basic

sense that ARVID hadn‟t been there. Some hopes. The voice

seemed slightly different from the one I‟d heard earlier more

serious, less chatty. I later learnt that this was merely part of

the „maturing‟ process in these short-life AIs, the effects of it

noticeable even to unenhanced human beings.

„We can always use another warm body, I suppose,‟ ARVID

said. „The Hetmen aren‟t exactly pleased with you, chum -

even under hypno, the details you brought out of Sharabeth

are partial to say the least. You‟ll have to do a lot better than

that, if you‟re going in again.‟

„Yeah, well,‟ I said. „I‟d like to see you do better in the -

Hang on a minute.‟ My attention finally caught up with what

my ears had heard but I‟d missed. „Did you say going in

again?‟

„Pretty damn hooty, we‟re going in again,‟ said ARVID.

„Whoever or whatever this “Sleed” is, he, she or it is taking

the incorporate name in vain and bringing it into disrepute.

This situation has to be resolved.‟

„Now let me get this straight,‟ I said, not quite sure that I

was hearing this. „You‟re not so much concerned with the fact

that Sharabeth‟s been turned into a Belsen as big as the

world, as with the fact that some sort of copyright‟s been

infringed?‟

„Not at all,‟ said ARVID smoothly. „That‟s just one factor

among many, including the fact that our patrons lost a lot of

their people on the planet itself. Whoever‟s responsible must

be found and brought to justice.‟

„Justice, right,‟ I said. „I can see you‟re really hot on that

round here. So what are you going to do about it, then?‟

„Your sojourn on Sharabeth,‟ ARVID said, „inconclusive

though it was, allowed us to get a precise fix and set up a

direct and relatively stable portal. This allows the advanced

deployment of relevant materials and personnel…‟

„The angels are going in mob-handed,‟ Kara said. She

seemed angry. „Direct military intervention. And, since

ordinary humans still can‟t stand the place, guess who these

“personnel” are going to actually be.‟

I thought about this. „So, I take it me and Kara are going to

be included in all this?‟

„We might as well get some use out of you,‟ said ARVID, a

bit snottily for my liking. I was going to tell the AI precisely

what I thought about that, when something struck me. It

wasn‟t as if I had any feelings either way about these putative

APE people who were going in – the fact that I‟d been almost

completely isolated since first waking, before we even went

into Sharabeth, meant I could hardly imagine, let alone

sympathize with, them. It was more to do with the fact that I,

and Kara, were being taken along for the ride and the whole

scenario just seemed somehow wrong. There was some detail

of my stay in the Sleed Incorporation that was on the tip of

the mental tongue and I couldn‟t quite shake it loose...

„You‟re thinking of this in the wrong terms,‟ I said. „You‟re

thinking of it like we‟re two armies in a war and doing -‟ I

realized that, either from my APE design specs, or from the

fact that my „real‟ memories couldn‟t see soldiers, full stop, as

anything other than an Enemy to be fought against, that I

didn‟t know a thing about being a soldier per se. „Well, you

know, doing soldiery things. The Sleed Incorporation seemed

to be run on a kind of business dynamic, killing people

almost literally on an industrial basis. They talked about

employees and products, even bloody performance-related

awards...‟ I almost had it, then. „If you just go in mob-

handed, treat this like a purely military situation, you‟re just

going to get your collective arse kicked. It‟s like the difference

between subtlety of concept and subtlety of execution -

you‟ve got to go in with armed force, but you should be

thinking incorporate-takeover politics, and for that you need

hard and detailed information.‟

„Hard information,‟ said ARVID, „that you singularly failed

to obtain.‟

„Yeah, well,‟ I said, as the memory I‟d been looking for

finally surfaced. To this day I‟m not sure if the idea I was

about to propose was my own work, or whether I had been

psychologically led by the nose towards it in some hope that I

would volunteer. „I think I just might know where we can get

it.‟

CHAPTER 7

Take a good look at the next few hundred vehicles you see

anything from a gasoline-powered automobile, to a hov-car,

to a motorized rickshaw full of whippets. Look at them

closely, force yourself to examine each and every one as if it

were the most important thing in the world and your life

depended on it. At some point, you‟ll see one, instantly

dismiss it as completely unimportant and move on - and

that’s the one you should be watching for. The things are

designed psychonomically to deflect the attention in the same

way as a fractured-prismatic flier deflects radar. They work

only on a basically humanoid neurology, and occur only in

the more developed population centres of the galaxy - but

since Mira and I were at least halfway human, and in a

developed population centre of the galaxy, this was hardly a

lot of help.

Apart from that psychonomic shell, these vehicles are

basically nothing but a chassis, engine and a guidance

system, the remaining space packed with a liberal quantity of

high explosive. Basically, they‟re mobile bombs, and were

once used heavily by the various incorporations, when the

power struggle between them was one hell of a lot nastier

than it is now. They can cruise around for years on autopilot,

wandering the transit systems unnoticed, until one of them is

streamed a target by whoever has its access codes. It then

latches on to the target and follows it, waits until it stops and

then happily converts its payload into quantities of heat, light

and kinetic energy, which is not, unsurprisingly, one of life‟s

great thrills.

„Take a look at the monitor,‟ I said to Mira.

She glanced at it, then peered closely. „Oh shit.‟

„My sentiments precisely,‟ I said. „Also, while you‟re at it

take a look at our power.‟

Mira looked at the readouts showing how the car, only

partially recharged when I‟d appropriated it, was now

approaching empty. „Oh shit again.‟

„So what we‟re going to do is this,‟ I said in my best let‟s-

take-charge voice. „When I give the word, you boot our Mr

Praetorian out and jump after him. Get him away from here

and get in contact with Braxiatel, see if he can‟t have

someone bring you in. I‟ll stay with the car and try to deal

with the thing behind.‟

„Bollocks,‟ Mira said. „You‟re coming with me.‟

„Not a chance,‟ I said. „Listen, we‟re talking tactics here.

That thing might be tracking the car - but for all we know it

might be locked on to some implant in Praetorian. Splitting

up gives at least one of us a chance to get away with what we

know.‟

„What we know, of course,‟ said Mira, „being about as much

worth as a tuppenny toss. And that‟s utter bollocks and you

know it. That‟s your basic tail-and-destroy drone back there

and - unless there‟s been some whole new advance in their

systems that we‟ve never so much as heard a sniff of - it‟s

tailing the car. You‟re gonna die and you know it.‟

„So let‟s just make sure I don‟t take you and our Mr

Praetorian with me. As you said, we still don‟t know which

side of the conflict he‟s ultimately on.‟ I slowed the car to a

fast-run crawl and shot the left back door. „Now, if you don‟t

do it in the next ten seconds I‟m going to slam on the brakes

and we all go boom.‟

„Oh for fuck’s sake.‟ Mira sighed the sigh of every woman in

the entire universe at the intransigence of universal man.

„What the hell. It‟s your funeral. Memorial service, I should

say, „cause there‟s not gonna be enough of you left to bury.‟

She clambered into the back and grabbed hold of the still

unconscious Praetorian. „OK, let‟s do this.‟

The moment she was out I hit the acceleration, not

bothering to check back and see if she was OK. She‟d either

made it or she hadn‟t, but, either way, there was nothing I

could do about it. After a while, I checked the rear monitor to

make sure the drone was still following me, experienced a

moment of panic when I saw that it wasn‟t, then recalled the

whole point about these drones, checked the monitor in

sideways-squinting fashion and breathed a small sigh of

relief.

Not a big sigh of relief, though, because, when you came

right down to it, I was still being followed by a

psychonomically sculpted, guided bomb on wheels that was

at some point going to blow my arse out of my ears.

I drove around for maybe four minutes, with the half-

formed idea that this might give Mira and her charge a bit

more time to get safely out of the area - as if, in the real

world, you‟d send a single drone after the people you want to

kill and that‟s it. The readouts told me I was operating on the

last of the emergency reserve, though, and from here on in it

wouldn‟t matter a toss what I did. What the hell - the odds

weren‟t going to get any better. I locked down the controls

and jumped, leaving the car to carry on dead ahead and

plough, not particularly spectacularly, into a series of

streetside skips.

I hit the ground in a slightly misjudged roll that pitched me

flat on my back, bounced to my feet in overdrive and

prepared to run. I didn‟t have a hope in hell of escaping the

blast envelope, but you‟ve gotta keep trying, the gods help

them as help themselves, faint heart never won fair lady and

any amount of other vaguely relevant platitudinous crap.

That is, I made ready to run - and then I noticed through the

slow-motion sensorium of jacked-up senses that the

attention-camouflaged vehicle behind me had slowed to a

stop.

And something came out of it.

It was roughly the size of a man, but bulkier and more

ragged. A reddish light pulsed and flared in its eyes, its

hands were jagged claws and it was coming for me faster

than a man ever could.

Now I‟d had my Gun on me ever since I‟d left the club. The

thing about suddenly finding yourself in a situation stickier

than somewhat, however, is that you go with your impulses,

whether they‟re right or wrong, and you keep on going with

„em just as hard as you can - and my impulses were

currently set to flight rather than fight. The monstrous,

semihuman form slashed its claws across the precise space

in which I no longer was, having turned tail the moment I

saw it and just pigged the bastard out. I‟m capable of

running on the level of a high-end basic human athlete for

quite some time, and in this case I put in a little bit of extra

effort - which shows how brave, courageous and generally

dauntless I am, in my opinion, because I didn‟t worry about

getting a stitch in my side.

I headed for the lights of the nearest transit station, the

creature almost literally on my heels, purely on the basis that

it was somewhere to go - though the little bit of my mind that

concentrates on pure survival had the idea that there might

be other people there, and maybe the creature behind me

would go for them instead of me. Some hopes. I vaulted the

turnstiles to find myself on the narrow platform of an empty

tube, and subliminally noted from the station displays that it

would be at least a minute and a half before the next transit

capsule arrived.

Stuck in a corner, now, I had only one option. I pulled the

Gun and turned to see the creature right behind, tangled

briefly in the turnstiles I‟d negotiated, on account of how it

had simply smashed its way through. I selected blast bolts

with a high yield and fired.

I then spent a happy minute and a half letting fly at the

creature - and if that doesn‟t sound like a long time then I‟d

invite you to try. The bolts and rapid-fire microgrenades

damaged it, but nowhere near enough; it seemed to be

possessed of some utter and ferocious madness that

rendered it impervious. The best I could do was knock it

back, again and again, but each time it would get up again

and lunge. And each time it lunged closer.

The sweat was pouring off me, certain other kinds of liquid

were making themselves uncomfortably evident, and the Gun

was almost entirely depleted by the time the capsule finally

came. I think that if I hadn‟t by pure luck had my back

directly to the doors when they opened, the creature would

have eviscerated me with its final swipe. As it was, I stumbled

backward, receiving a nasty gash across my left shoulder in

the process, and turned the stumble into a backward dive

while simultaneously triggering a highly dangerous and, if

not illegal, generally frowned-upon, modification that let the

Gun expend everything it had in a single go.

The multiple concussion flung the creature back against

the transit station wall. It didn‟t stay there long. It reared up

on its hind legs and charged, shrieking with absolute and

unstoppable rage. As it did so, though, the doors of the

capsule slid smoothly shut, the pneumatics cut in, and the

last thing I saw was the creature‟s distorted, damaged face

before we were away.

* * *

It being late in the local-Habitat night, the capsule was

almost completely empty: the only thing I saw that might

have been another living soul was a slumped and dirty

bundle of a dosser in one of the comer seats, who I think was

dead. I certainly wasn‟t going to prod him, her or it to make

sure, and merely kept half an eye on him, her or it in case

he, she or it suddenly started doing anything that might have

been dangerous to me.

As the capsule shot through stations towards some

ultimate terminal with access to a transmat, I let my other

one and a half eyes gaze absently at the public view screens,

set to alternate advertising and news channels behind their

cold-cast cages. A slightly anomalous series of solar flares

had increased seasonal temperatures across seven different

Habitats of the Chain, resulting in an increase in projected

per-capita deaths due to heat prostration by eleven point five

per cent. The paracholera epidemic that had thus far killed

one hundred and thirty-four people over the past few weeks

had finally been traced to a contaminated batch of a variety

of snowcone, which had now been removed from the market.

Mister Meaty Foods, a subsidiary of the ZipCo incorporation,

had announced a complete and thorough investigation while

at no time actually admitting a thing. On a lighter note, a six-

year-old fnarok named Humphrey had been trained by his

proud owners to play the bagpipes while tap-dancing

underwater...

My one-and-a-half eyes might have been watching this

stuff, but my attention itself was decidedly elsewhere. It was

focused on the image of the barely humanoid creature still

etched on my mind. If you examined it like this, now that

evisceration by way of its horrible jagged claws wasn‟t so

much of an option, you noticed that „barely humanoid‟ was

not, precisely, the right description.

Physically, the thing was human, probably down to its last

chromosome. Something had informed it, possessed it,

however, twisted its body into monstrous proportions and

postures, warped its mind to something completely and

utterly else. Birds and insects were our brothers and cousins

compared with what this physically human thing had

become.

It wasn‟t like the cases of possession I‟d seen on Dellah and

Thanaxos. The entities that subsumed their living hosts to

become embodied gods operated in a different way. But the

thing was, I had seen something like this creature before.

Rather longer before. Ten years before, to be exact.

I thought back over the events of the past few days, what

I‟d seen and thought and done, and they began to take on the

aspect of a maze, some cardboard rat-maze in a psychology

lab through which I was being run.

The thing was, I was starting to realize, the Big Cheese was

probably in another laboratory entirely.

My comms unit bleeped reassuringly as I neared my

apartment door. All the same, I backed up against the

outside wall before I opened it. Nothing actually jumped out

and tried to tear me limb from limb, so I decided to risk it.

„Hello, Box,‟ I said as I entered. „Any nasty people in here I

should be aware of?‟

„Not that I‟m aware of,‟ said Box.

The gash across my shoulder was closing up, but throbbed

with that kind of burning ache that suggested I‟d caught

some kind of infection with which my physiology couldn‟t

instantly and automatically cope. I switched the phone to

replay in passing and headed for the kitchen and my stash of

the more abstruse antibiotic and antibiogenic compounds -

and then I pelted back on overdrive. The voice on the phone

had been distorted and garbled, but recognizable with such

an utter clarity that it sank hooks into my heart.

It was Kara.

I fumbled with the controls so much that I ended up

backtracking too far and catching the end of the previous

message („... sent under plain cover, discretion assured. So call

ZipCred seven seven oh one four seven...‟) before I found it:

„I‟m sending this on blind-delay. It should bounce around

the Chain systems for a couple of days before it reaches you,

and if all goes well I‟ll kill it long before then. I just hope you

never get this, basically. I know how you get about people

touching your things, but I‟ve got inside your AI and I - Oh

shit, gotta go. I‟ll call you back in a few minutes.‟

(Click, click.)

„Something exciting is happening in the world of consumer

durables. ZipCo™ -‟

ZipCo™ was going to receive the nasty end of a dirty-

delivery mutagen bomb if I had anything to do with it. I

blipped through fifteen minutes‟ worth of the crap and this

time ended up overshooting.

„...what I know. You‟re gonna have to put the pieces

together yourself, but I don‟t have the time now.‟ Kara‟s voice

was rougher, harsh with the rasping breath of over-exertion

and desperation. „The file name is ARVID. It‟s encrypted, and

I can‟t say the password over the phone, but it should be

obvious. Remember, the name of the file is ARVID. I have to

go. There‟s no time left, I... Listen, whatever else happens,

don‟t forget that the thing with Ranok T‟ma and the lami, it

wasn‟t your fault. I really think we could have - No time.

Goodbye.‟

(Click, click.)

Did you ever lose something small, like a cigarette lighter or

something, and you look all over for it, picking things up and

moving them around, and then you realize that you‟re

picking things up with one hand because there‟s something

in the other? Over the past few days I‟d known that people

had been monkeying around in Box, but there was one

question, an incredibly obvious question, that it had never

occurred to me to ask.

So I asked it now. „Any new files stored in you, Box? Files

that haven‟t been put in by me or the background stuff from

Braxiatel?‟

„Yes,‟ Box said, instantly and simply. „I have a file tagged

ARVID, stored via remote protocols by an anonymous user.‟

„If I asked you to run a trace on the source,‟ I said, with

great restraint, I thought, given the circumstances, „would

that anonymous user turn out to be Kara Delbane?‟

„It would,‟ said Box. „Do you want me to do it?‟

There was no point in blaming Box. AI installations over a

certain point mimic human interactions to such an extent

that we can sometimes forget that their thought processes

work in a completely different way. The plain fact was that I

could be dying in front of Box for lack of the file in question,

and, while it would try to help me in every way of which it

was capable, it was simply incapable of giving me so much as

a hint of the file‟s existence unless I actually asked. Besides,

at the moment, I was too busy trying to find a clean data

wafer, pulling off the wrapper and slamming it into one of

Box‟s removable drives to blame anyone.

„Give me a copy of ARVID,‟ I said.

„Access is password-protected,‟ Box said. „Do you have the

password?‟

Given the name ARVID, and everything I knew about Kara,

and everything I‟d learnt on the case, there was only one

possible choice.

„Password incorrect,‟ said Box. „Access is password-

protected. Do you have the password?‟

So I gave it my other choice. The drive sizzled to life with

that sound you get like a million amoebas frying bacon. „How

long is this going to take?‟ I asked.

„There‟s a lot of corruption,‟ said Box. „Random electrical

noise and intrusions of what seems to be a GalNet

advertising broadcast for a spanner that undoes the bulbs in

hand-held torches. I‟m having to extrapolate the meaningful

data. One minute, thirty-two seconds.‟

I whistled through my teeth. Even factoring in the

processor time involved in cleaning it up, that was a hell of a

lot of data. The gash in my shoulder was still hurting, so to

take my mind off it I flipped through the various GalNet

newscasts of the day, filtered and stored via Box‟s secondary

functions to tag keywords and images of interest to me.

Almost immediately I hit on a face I recognized, on account of

the fact that I saw it in the mirror most mornings. Apart from

that subtle wrongness that comes from seeing a still when

you expect a mirror image, other things had been done to it;

little changes here and there that, while it was still

recognizable as me, turned it into something slightly brutish

and nasty-looking. I cut in the soundtrack:

„...denounced by a conclave of incorporate representatives

and administrative officials, this man had been declared an

Open Target with a level-fifteen bounty. Caution: this man is

armed and combat-trained. If you do not have the requisite

training and experience, do not, repeat, do not attempt to -‟

Ever have one of those days? The time stamp showed that

this item had been in circulation for something like four

hours by now and I‟d completely missed it.

Declaring an Open Target is not done lightly, involving as it

does a firm consensus among a working majority of all the

myriad factions in the Chain. It takes some Crime Against

Life so horrendous that these factions can agree on how

horrendous it is, and I was pretty sure I‟d never done

anything quite so horrendous as that. The only answer was

that, never mind my worrying about all the people getting

into Box, someone had got into the core systems of the Chain

itself and had used them to finger me. Fraudulent or not,

though, the upshot of it was that absolutely anyone who felt

like it, and thought they had the means to do it, could have a

pop - and I started thinking uneasily of just how many ways

these people could find out where I lived.

The copying of the ARVID file still had almost half a minute

to run. I had to force myself not to simply pull the wafer from

the slot and start running - telling myself sternly that

another twenty-odd seconds wouldn‟t make a difference

either way. It seemed like an eternity, though, before Box

spat it out. I grabbed the thing, stuck it in my jacket. Out of

the door, straight for the tubes - and right into three figures

coming out of them: the SecServ™ investigator, Forrester,

and two bulky Secmen in full armour, their riot-control

weapons already drawn.

I just had time to remember that the Gun I was reaching

for had been fired dry before they zapped me. Forrester

walked over to me and loomed over me, as the charges from

two different taser attachments did interesting and

conflicting things to my nervous system.

„I‟ll have to ask you to accompany me to the station to help

with our enquiries,‟ he said with nasty satisfaction. „You‟re

fucking nicked, me old son.‟

BACKGROUND 8

Kara flipped the readout back from her eyes. „There‟s a

secondary blip maybe five and a half kilometres from the

Incorporation itself. I think that‟s where all the ground-to-air

stuff came from.‟

„So we‟ll avoid it,‟ I said, fiddling with the weapons-control

board and wishing like hell I‟d spent a bit of time practising

with it rather than just trusting to the fact that I knew how

to operate it from my implants. I know how to wear shoes, if

it comes to that, but you don‟t go out dancing in a brand-new

pair.

I was also kicking myself for having suggested this Idiotic

exploit in the first place. It‟d seemed like a good Idea at the

time - the Angels‟ main force sets up and fortifies a

beachhead at the portal we had opened, and fights off the

obvious reaction to that, leaving Kara and me to scoot on

ahead in a high-powered, overarmed and heavily armoured

flier at ground-zero, and hopefully under the defence net that

had taken us out before. As the only operatives with direct

experience of Sharabeth, we knew the score, and the pair of

us had been kitted out with total-sensorium broadcast rigs to

pump back everything we learnt and when we learnt it,

depending on what I hoped we‟d learn if it was actually in the

place I hoped we‟d learn it.

(It‟s just occurred to me that it might seem a little strange

that we hadn‟t had all this high-end stuff the first time we

entered Sharabeth‟s spaces. Well, all I can say is that nobody

had clue one as to what we were dealing with the first time.

This time we had some vague idea - and so we were going

loaded for armour-plated ursine, though, like I said, at the

time I was too busy kicking myself to think much about it.)

„We‟re coming up on the main mass,‟ Kara said, in that

absently chatty kind of way people like pilots get when the

majority of their mind is concentrating on their job. „Pretty

soon now, we‟re gonna smack right into the side...‟

„Let‟s ditch, then,‟ I said. There‟s a largish clump of moving

things down there on the ground coming up. I say we just

land on them.‟

„Fine by me,‟ said Kara, and she ploughed the flier, through

a bank of rubble and a collection of basically human

creatures who I assume were some kind of guard patrol. I

was ejecting a couple of fragmentation clusters to take care of

any survivors, when a subsidiary system on my board started

having a small but insistent fit.

There‟s contamination trace out there,‟ I told Kara. „Not

much of it, but it looks like some kind of mutagenic gas,

Fifteen per cent chance one of us would breathe in a still-

active molecular chain.‟

„OK.‟ Kara tossed me a gas mask and, while I was sealing

myself into it, busied herself setting the flier‟s security

devices. „Active or passive?‟

„Oh, go on,‟ I said, „live a little and make „em active.‟

I detonated a couple of concussion charges to shift some of

the rubble and other items that had piled on top of us when

we hit, and shot the canopy. The weight of the flier had

ruptured what appeared to be an underground sewer main,

and it was from this that the gas had escaped. I shone a light

down the hole and saw a tangled mass of bones and

canisters in a slurry-like pool of some decomposing mush. I‟d

forgotten the immediacy of the conditions here on Sharabeth;

saliva spurted in my mouth, but fortunately we had come

prepared this time and had been fitted with a beta-blocking

compound on IV, so I didn‟t mess up the inside of my mask.

We circumnavigated the rupture and pressed on. Some time

later, we heard a quite impressive detonation as some

surviving basically human creature no doubt got a bit too

inquisitive about the flier.

The fearful pile that was the Sleed Incorporation loomed ever

closer, but the sheer size of it together with the vertiginous

effect of the boiling sky made judging the distance awkward.

It was almost an hour before we were directly in its shadow -

and found ourselves presented with a small problem.

„Are you getting all this?‟ I said, switching on the voice-

transmitter pack of my power suit, more or less to test it

„Oh yes, I‟m getting it, you bastard,‟ said the voice of

ARVID. One of the key points of the plan I‟d suggested was

that ARVID‟s central processing unit must be physically

stationed at the beachhead - purely in the interests of

communications efficiency, you understand. „How many of

these things did you say there were? A few thousand? Well,

I‟m here to tell you that we‟ve killed ten times that many and

they just keep coming…‟

It was impossible to hear any background noise behind the

voice, of course, since ARVID spoke through a voder unit, but

the distinct impression of nervousness in the voice itself

gladdened my heart and made me feel slightly better

disposed about the world in general.

„Can you see what I can see?‟ I asked him.

„I can see what you can see,‟ said ARVID, a little sulkily.

„Any suggestions?‟

„Yes,‟ said ARVID. „Jump.‟

I cut the connection and gazed miserably down into the dry

moat that separated us from the incorporation itself - too

wide for any grappling line and so deep that any bottom was

completely lost in shadow, even to my eyes. I fired up the

snoopers in my suit, but the point about something being

pitch-black is that image enhancement just enhances how

pitch-black it is.

„I don‟t remember that being here the last time,‟ I said.

„Yeah, well,‟ said Kara gloomily, „we went in and out

through the tunnels last time, remember? So what do we do

now? You know nasty things are gonna be waiting for us to

try that way again.‟

„You‟re probably right,‟ I said. I considered the options,

pulled the little flashlight I‟d used earlier from its biceps pack

and pitched it into the moat, aiming so far as I could for the

far side - it may seem a little odd that I had to consider this,

incidentally, but one of the things about armed combat is

that you have only the limited amount of stuff that you

happen to be carrying. You have to consider the pros and

cons of losing something and not being able to get it back.

The torch bounced sooner than I thought it would - which

wasn‟t saying much as I‟d half expected it to keep on falling

for ever. „Seventy, seventy-five metres,‟ I said, working it out

from the trajectory - nothing impressive about that, since it

popped into my head via routines that I think are the

implantational equivalent of the crappy little virtual

calculators you got on computer systems in my childhood.

„It‟s shorter than it‟s wide, which is probably the story of my

life.‟

„And when you grow up you want to be a double entendre,‟

said Kara, sourly.

„Quite so,‟ I said. I fired up the snoopers again and peered

across the great divide, trying to pull some kind of

meaningful information from the modest light of the torch

below. „There seem to be openings in the other side, below

ground level. God alone knows where they lead. What do you

think.‟

Kara unclipped the climbing gear from her belt. “What the

hell. It‟s doable, and if it‟s not we can come back up.‟

The climbing gear was based around the principle of a

monomolecular filament, with servo assisted carbon bearings

so that one could be raised and lowered without slicing off

one‟s fingers. Kara lowered me into the moat, on the basis

that a monomolecular filament with servo-assisted carbon

bearings was yet another one of the things I knew about but

had never actually used. My feet crunched into loose gravel; I

unclipped myself from the line and checked things out - the

light from the torch now being close enough to turn the

pitch-dark into at least a dusky twilight.

There was not a lot to see. The moat ran off laterally for

maybe a kilometre and a half in either direction, its bottom

patchily flat with either gravel or loose concrete, the only

irregularities being a sporadic scattering of little ragged-

looking hummocks that I assumed were just your basic

debris or the mortal remains of people who had fallen in over

the years. I watched these little mounds just long enough to

assure myself that none of them were moving in a

threatening manner, then turned my attention upward to

check on Kara‟s descent - and something hit me from behind.

I was thrown flat on my face and felt the tearing smack of

gravel impacting into it. One hell of a lot of weight crunched

into my spine and intense pinpricks of what I thought at the

time was heat slashed across my shoulders. Something

started chewing my skull with that kind of grunk-grunk

sound you get when you hear a dog gnawing on a bone.

Somehow, I managed to get my hand up over my head, and

my fingers brushed against a clump of warm and matted,

soggy hair. I got a hold and pulled the thing that was

attacking me from my back. It hit the ground in a kind of

small explosion of steel and meat and other somewhat more

liquid substances - and I realized I‟d gone into that Combat

Overdrive thing again.

For the moment, though, I didn‟t feel like doing anything

much except to clap a hand over the blood spurting from my

neck. Above me, I heard the sound of gunfire. Something hit

the ground heavily beside me and lunged for me - I nearly

went for it to the same spectacular effect as with the creature

that had attacked me, until Kara shouted, „Keep still, you

stupid little sod!‟ and shoved me back down and stapled the

torn artery in my neck.

Kara rolled me over and shot me with compressed

haemoglobic gel that would at least bulk up and help me stay

on top of catastrophic blood loss. She started slapping at my

arms and legs until I could feel them again and was perfectly

capable of shaking them uncontrollably myself. All the while,

she was tracking and popping with her gun. I was a bit dazed

at that point, and dimly wondered what she was shooting at.

Kara waved her free hand in my face. „How many fingers

am I holding up?‟

„Holding up what?‟ I asked.

She nodded to herself. „You‟ll do. You‟ll be all right. And,

after a line like that, I don‟t care if you‟ll be all right or not.‟

I hauled myself up groggily and looked at the remains of

the doglike creature I‟d killed. So far as I could judge after it

had been so spectacularly exploded apart, its bone structure

had been replaced by steel and on to its back had been

grafted large and fleshy flaps that I first took to be wings

until I realized that they could be extended to cover the entire

body mass to produce the impression of a slightly ragged but

unremarkable hump. I came to this highly perceptive

conclusion by way of the fact that, looking further afield, I

now saw that all the other humps I‟d noticed strewn across

the floor of the moat had transferred into large and nasty

doglike creatures and were heading our way.

„Look, are you just gonna sit there all day or what?‟ Kara

said, still tracking and popping at the things with her gun. „I

could use a little help here...‟

I flexed the muscles of my shoulders experimentally, and

found that surgical staples hold you together better than

skin, sometimes. I‟d felt better, but then again, given the

events of the relatively few days since I‟d first been woken up,

I‟d felt one hell of a lot worse. „I think I can make it,‟ I said.

We headed for the far wall of the trench, shooting any of

the doglike creatures that came too close. I only hoped that

I‟d been right and there really were openings in the side, and

that, in the end, they actually led anywhere.

CHAPTER 8

I‟ve mentioned how SecServ™ and their ilk had no ultimately

official remit, but they operated in the form if not the fact of a

planetary-based policing service, and there are certain agreed

protocols that must be followed in a certain line of work in

any case. These protocols should have had me formally

charged, and the details of the charges posted, but none of

that happened. It‟s my guess that the bounty for

apprehending an Open Target was the biggest score

SecServ™ had had all year, and they wanted to keep me

under wraps for as long as they could to prevent any of the

genuinely heavy people laying claim to me. In any event, I

was simply dragged into the holding cages and left there.

This was fine by me. The longer I stayed out of the quasi-

official records, the less chance there would be of everybody

and his dog getting a lock on me the instant I escaped. I

didn‟t have any fear that I couldn‟t escape the moment I felt

like it, of course: a Mickey Mouse outfit like SecServ™

operated on the same level in the law-enforcement stakes as,

centuries ago, a US Savings and Loan did compared with a

real bank.

The effects of being zapped by a couple of tasers was

wearing off. I hauled myself to my feet and looked around the

holding cage and took in the standard low-level mix of petty-

criminal and civil-action detritus. One large guy with more

tattoos than skin surface, who I instantly pegged as the Bull

around these parts, caught me looking at him, considered

making something of it and then thought better of it when I

smiled at him in a certain way. I sat down on a bench that

had been hurriedly vacated by the occupants when I walked

towards them smiling in the same way, and began to

formulate my plan for escape.

The plan was so audacious, so brilliant and such a work of

genius that could only ever have been come up with by an

utter, utter genius, that I hesitate to detail it here. It was so

good that Papillon, the Prisoner of Zenda and the Count of

Monte Cristo would have turned green with envy and turned

themselves back in again in shame. It was a plan, in short,

that was worthy of going down in the annals of intergalactic

history under Plans, Most Inconceivably Brilliant Ever, and

that‟s my story and I‟m sticking to it.

All in all, it was a bit of a pity that the door of the cage

chose that moment to swing open, and auodier armoured

Secman chose to zap me again. A lower charge, this time,

just enough to leave me weak and dazed.

„You. Out.‟ The Secman pulled me out and shoved me down

a corridor, bouncing me occasionally off the walls. „You‟re a

lucky boy, you know that?‟ he said, in the restrained-anger

tones of someone who would have liked to bounce me harder

if he could. „Friends in high places. They sent a car for you.‟

Even in my groggy state, I knew that this was complete

bollocks. Nobody knew I was here - nobody who mattered -

and one of the more distressing things about being an Open

Target is that those who want you tend to prefer you

somewhat deader than alive...

I was suddenly in bright sunlight that seemed to cast no

shadow - the substation in which I was being held was under

a power dome, which captured and stored available sunlight,

outputting it over the entire inner surface of the dome during

the local „day‟.

I was in the substation‟s internal parking lot, just the place

to stick some poor sod up against the wall and administer

law „n‟ order at the blunt end by way of the judicious

application of a blaster bolt in the back of the neck. I tried to

make a fight of it, preferably with the option of putting in a

bit of distance first, but my muscles just weren‟t working

right.

„Take it easy, sonny.‟ The Secman pushed me into the back

of a waiting hov-car, giving me the flat of his boot for good

luck. The door gull-winged shut behind me and I lurched

around spastically in some hope of getting a look at the

driver. The basic physics of my reaction time and the way my

brain‟s connected up mean I can pull an identification out of

back-of-the-head clues, integrating the data to peg a man or

woman I‟ve barely glimpsed before and come out with some

quite startlingly extensive insights.

None of that was needed though, since I recognized the

driver like a shot. It was Investigator Forrester and he was

holding a gun.

„Look, take it easy!‟ he said hurriedly, even before I

belatedly realized that he was holding the Gun - my Gun -

the wrong way round and offering it to me. There was

something about the lines of his face: harder, but more

intelligent, and with a sense of buried humour somewhere

deep inside. It was as if he had dropped an act and become,

in some sense, more alive.

„I don‟t expect you to believe me on the spot,‟ he said, „but

just so you know. My name isn‟t Forrester, it‟s Cwej. Chris

Cwej. I‟m helping Benny and Braxiatel for the moment and

I‟m here to bring you in.‟

* * *

„You could have told me Forr- I mean Cwej was on the team,‟

I said. „Ouch! Mira, you have the heart and soul of a

Torquemada in training.‟

„And I know just how much it hurts,‟ said Mira, dropping

the surgical stapler into a chipped, antique tin-and-enamel

kidney dish. The gash inflicted on me by the creature in the

transit station had been slightly deeper than I‟d thought and

had opened up again. „And hey, I didn‟t know about it till a

few hours ago.‟

„And you didn‟t ask,‟ said Irving Braxiatel.

Apart from the injury, which hurt like hell, I felt one hell of

a lot better by now, slightly more on top of the game.

Braxiatel‟s suite was precisely how I‟d left it, as though the

man himself went and locked himself in a cupboard or

something when there was nobody else around. Now he stood

there in his pristine suit, watching Mira‟s impromptu

doctoring with vague interest, as if it was something he had

known about in theory, but never actually seen in practice.

„It would have served no purpose to, ah, “blow his cover”,‟

Braxiatel continued, savouring words he had in all

probability never said aloud in his life. „As it is, we only did

so now to take you from the field of operation. You‟ve

annoyed quite a few people, apparently. Quite a few people

are roaming the Proximan Chain with your description and

“shoot-to-kill” orders.‟ He proffered me one of the ubiquitous

martinis that he didn‟t touch himself.

„Why what an exciting life I do lead,‟ I said, sourly, taking it.

„So where is our Mr Cwej now, precisely?‟

„He‟s off dealing with the data wafer you had on you when

you were apprehended,‟ Braxiatel said. „Apparently, the

application of taser charges garbled the data it held, but he

has high hopes of reconstructing it. Thus far it appears to be

the organizational archives of some long-defunct paramilitary

concern. They seem, however, to have been heavily

annotated, and a large supplementary file appears to have

been attached.‟

„Any idea what‟s in it?‟ Mira asked.

„I just might,‟ I said, „and I‟m surprised you don‟t know

from looking at me.‟

„How many times do I have to tell you,‟ said Mira, „my stuff

don‟t work like that. All I know is you‟ve had a bright idea.‟

„OK, then.‟ I climbed off the kissing chair on which I was

sitting, kissing not being much of an option at this point, and

paced the room a bit, counting points off:

„OK... you call me in and give me a specific amount of

information for the job. That could be for any number of

reasons, including but not necessarily due to the fact that

you may or may not have some double agent working with

you, who cut out certain things for his or her own ends.

Nothing conclusively suspicious about that either way. Benny

and I investigate Kara‟s murder, start with the body and then

her home on the start-in-the-middle-and-work-outward

basis, and find enough leads to suggest further avenues of

investigation - again, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

„This is where things start to not quite add up, though. We

go to a room in the Connaught hotel, and a bomb explodes in

an incredibly contrived fashion involving a mail chute. But, if

the idea is to kill someone nosing around in there, why not

just rig the bomb to the door? A clue leads me and Mira to a

club, and at the precise time we leave it, a hunter-killer

drone latches on to us, or so we think. It is in fact the carrier

for a lethal, and not a little monstrous, biological organism -

but, again, why go to that kind of overelaborate trouble? Why

not simply send a hunter-killer after us in the first place?

Come to that, why do anything even remotely like that at all?

Someone killed Kara, knew I was associating with her, must

have known what my reaction would be to that whether you

offered me the job or not - so why not just avoid the

complications and kill me the first chance they got?‟

„It occurs to me,‟ said Braxiatel, „that any of the things you

mentioned would have killed a human being. And you, in a

number of senses, are not.‟

„That‟s the point,‟ I said. „The people behind this know

precisely who and what I am. And, knowing that, they knew

that, if they went up against me directly and I survived, I‟d be

on to them like a shot. They knew that, if they tried overtly

and failed, nothing would have saved them from me.‟

„Don‟t you think,‟ said Braxiatel, a little dubiously, „you

might be overplaying your capabilities slightly?‟

„Yeah, well, whatever. The stakes I think they‟re playing for,

they simply didn‟t want to commit to an absolute either/or

risk like that, however unlikely the negative result for them.

Instead, they‟ve been running me through a carefully

constructed maze, a process made possible by die fact that

they‟re inside the various systems of the Chain and can

control them to a certain extent. It would be a nice little

bonus if I did die by some chance, but the primary function

was to keep me running around and not thinking properly.

And it worked, mostly, the sequence of events being pitched

just to the point of obfuscation to slip under the mental radar

and let me see how ultimately contrived it all was.

„Thing is, processes like that can never be one hundred per

cent, no matter how much processing power or how many

resources you throw at them. These people made mistakes,

little things like replacing the suicide-proof glass in the

Connaught room with the ordinary kind – and one so big and

blatant that it can only be one of two things, like that

absolute either/or choice I talked about. Either it was set up

purposefully to confuse me further and I really don‟t have

clue one what‟s really going on, or I have to believe that it

was a genuine, innate mistake in their thinking and I‟d

rather believe that.‟

„So what‟s this so-called big mistake?‟ Mira asked.

„The creature that was in the hunter-killer and attacked me

in the transit station,‟ I said. „It‟s a pattern-recognition thing.

I‟ve seen something that triggered that precise sense of

recognition before.‟

I turned to Braxiatel. „There‟s something here, like you

thought, but it‟s not what you‟ve been looking for. It‟s

something with some superficial similarities to the entities on

Dellah, but it‟s completely different - and I‟ve encountered it

before, on a planet by the name of Sharabeth.‟

„Sharabeth?‟ Braxiatel seemed slightly taken aback. „I‟m not

sure I‟m aware of any such -‟

„Check out the name in the GalNet archives,‟ I told him. „I

don‟t think you‟ll need to, though. I think that, when you

ungarble the file in the data wafer Box made, you‟ll find

anything you need to know about it - and I think that, when

you decode the mysterious attachment, you‟ll find the

preliminary logistics for setting up an approximation of those

conditions right here in the Chain.‟

Whatever structure housed Braxiatel‟s establishment, it must

have been big, something roughly on the equivalent of an

incorporate hive. I counted three floors and any number of

rooms and corridors before I came to what appeared to be a

state-of-the-art medical facility capable of looking after the

health of a small community.

Mira took me down. In the few hours she‟d been here, she

seemed to have been given the run of the place and seemed

remarkably at home - whether by virtue of her connection to

me, her connection to Benny or of simply that Braxiatel knew

of her and trusted the reports, I couldn‟t tell.

On the way we met a smattering of people, none of whom I

recognized, and several people whom I recognized from their

movements and musculature as APEs. Each was intent upon

some business or other, probably related to the case on

which I was working myself, but there was no sense of the

cohesion you find in a military or paramilitary group, no

sense of working within a specific command structure

towards some unified end. I already knew that Braxiatel‟s

concern was not an organization in that sense, being for the

most part groups of loosely connected friends pitching in

where the circles of the Venn diagram intersected, but this

distinct lack of a couple of hundred ground troops ready and

waiting go in and pull respective nuts out of the fire made me

vaguely uneasy. Braxiatel was operating, if not on a

shoestring basis, then with a crew so skeleton you could

shine a light through the ribcage.

The med centre itself was likewise entirely automated. The

first thing I saw, hooked to bleep machines in a chamber

behind an observation window, was the body of Praetorian.

„He‟s still out,‟ said Mira. „I told you you shouldn‟t have hit

him so hard.‟

„Yes you did, didn‟t you? Anything show up on his

bioscans?‟

„Nothing, so far as I know. Physical medicine isn‟t exactly

my field of expertise. From what I can gather from the idiot-

readouts, Praetorian is just your basic, unmodified human.‟

I shrugged. „Could mean anything - if I‟m right about

things, any danger he might present won‟t show up on a

purely physical scan anyway. I‟m assuming he‟s seriously

sedated?‟

„I think so,‟ said Mira.

„I‟d find out if I were you,‟ I said. „I have a nasty feeling that

if he ever wakes up we‟re going to end up with another

creature like the one that attacked me. Either way, the guy is

one too many random factors at this point and I want him

totally out of the game.‟

In a private room we found Benny, motionless on a hospital

bed in old-fashioned-looking, stripy pyjamas and hooked to

bleep machines similar to those attached to Praetorian. She

seemed thinner and smaller since the last time I‟d seen her,

and there was a sense of vulnerability about her - the

vulnerability of being utterly defenceless against, and dead

to, the world. Her face seemed in no way peaceful, merely

blank and slack, everything behind it that might animate it

simply switched off.

Cwej was in there with her, sitting on a fold-up chair and

looking at her with something of the air of a lost child - it

really was this guy‟s day for evidencing new and superficially

conflicting emotional states, which is part and parcel of being

a real person rather than somebody playing a role.

„Is there any way we can shock her out of it or something?‟

I asked him.

He jumped a little, startled from the morass of his own

thoughts, and regarded me bleakly. „I don‟t know. Braxiatel

told me that she was very clear about refusing heroic

measures if something like this happened. She‟s been very ill

and in a lot of pain these last few weeks …‟

Refusing something „heroic‟ didn‟t quite tie in with what I

knew of Benny. „Yeah, well,‟ I said. „If you‟re very ill and in a

lot of pain, you sometimes aren‟t thinking straight and you

say things you don‟t mean.‟ I turned to Mira. „Is there any

way you can go in deep and dig out what she really wants?‟

Mira looked at me coldly. „That‟s just the kind of invasive

procedure she said she didn‟t want. I‟m not gonna do

something like that on your say-so.‟

I sensed the edge of the kind of system of professional

ethics that, in me, regards the offering of money unasked as

an insult. I let the matter drop and turned back to Cwej. „I

understand you‟ve been trying to crack the data I brought in.

Any joy so far?‟

„Not a lot.‟ Cwej indicated a remote data-display pad lying

on top of one of the bleep-machine monitors. „The archive

material is easy enough to reconstruct from available

sources. As for the rest, it appears to be a sheaf of

operational logistics - but the thing about logistics is that the

object of them is a given. If you know what the various

operations are supposed to achieve then you don‟t need to

note it down, and if you don‟t then you can‟t work it out from

just the logistical processes in themselves.‟ He snorted with a

degree of pique. „You could probably get more hard

information out of GalNet news...‟

Now, I‟m going to break the flow here a bit and say it was at

this point that I had a really bright idea. Everybody‟s allowed

one or two of them per lifetime, and this was one of mine. I

didn‟t stick the finger in the air and shout „By crikey, I think

I‟ve got it!‟, but a number of vague thoughts bubbled up from

the bottom of what I laughingly call my mind and connected -

and, having made the connection, I knew with simple clarity

what I had to do. Mira caught wind of it and stared at me.

She started to say something but I silenced her with a glare.

We left Cwej to his vigil and headed back the way we had

come. When we were far enough away for me to be sure that

the transmissions wouldn‟t interfere with various bits of

medical equipment, I activated my comms link to Box.

„Have you done any thinking on your own time about the

ARVID file?‟ I asked.

„A fair bit,‟ said Box. „You didn‟t ask me, though.‟ I‟ll swear

that it managed to inject a vaguely hurt tone into its voice.

„Sorry, Box,‟ I told it. „I should have asked. What I want you

to do is correlate your thoughts on the matter with every

death of more than two people at a time logged into GalNet

over the last week. Concentrate on the stories where actual

figures are given, but make an educated guess where not.

Bum the results into your firmware and lock it down. Access

keyed to my physical presence alone. I‟ll be there to pick it up

in an hour. Got all that?‟

„I‟ve got it,‟ said Box.

„So do it.‟ I turned to Mira. „And what are you looking at me

like that for?‟

„You idiot!‟ she exploded. „Moron! I knew you had

something cooking in that so-called head, but that was just

plain moron.‟

I let myself feel angry at her hurtful words. „I know what

I‟m doing.‟

„Oh no you don‟t, you arrogant little sod,‟ she said. „You

think you‟re so much cleverer than these people and you‟re

not. You don‟t have the first clue what you‟re doing and I‟m

not going to let you do it‟

„Oh yeah?‟ I did a looming kind of thing over her. I felt a bit

bad about using my relative size and strength to intimidate

her, but in this case it really had to be done. „And what are

you going to do about it? Run off and tell your new friend

Braxiatel if you like, but you‟re not going to stop me.‟

Mira looked at me, saw what was on my mind, and wisely

decided not to try. I wasn‟t quite thinking rationally at that

point, after all.

If I‟d expected to learn the true location of Braxiatel‟s

establishment by way of driving out of it in a car from his

personal garage, I was disappointed. The garage had its own

transmat, which deposited me neatly at a major nexus, with

no immediately obvious way of getting back. Oh well, unless

anybody felt it worth their while to come after me, I was on

my own and that was fine by me.

The local day was angling to night as I reached my warren.

Assuming I hadn‟t laid it on too thick over the comms link

and with Mira, I still had around forty minutes before people

were expecting me to be in my apartment. I used some of the

time searching the car interior for stuff that might come in

useful. There was a lot of really sexy hi-tech equipment, the

problem being that it was all bolted down. In the end I just

took a couple of things from the glove compartment.

The apartment directly over mine was owned by an old

lady, Mrs Gooley. When I say „owned‟, I mean that she was a

kind of forgotten-about squatter of whom none of the

constantly rolling-over landlords of the warren had ever had

the heart to ask for back-rent or eviction. Mrs Gooley lived

alone, apart from a number of large and nasty pararats

which she thought were some variety of cat - Mr Gooley didn‟t

count, of course, on account of having died in some time out

of mind, being stuffed by an obliging taxidermist and kept

around for the company. I‟d cultivated my relationship with

Mrs Gooley over the months I‟d been living in the warren,

and she was under the impression that I was a member of

one of those cross-incorporate-funded charities that in the

Chain take the place of social services.

„Who are you?‟ she said suspiciously, glaring up at me

through cataracts and near-terminal senility. „What do you

want?‟

„What a card you are, Mrs Gooley!‟ I exclaimed with the

forced jollity common to all those who deal with the elderly,

and would even touch the buggers with a ten-foot pole when

it wasn’t strictly necessary. „You know who I am, of course

you do.‟

„They‟ve cut me off again,‟ she told me, truculently.

God alone knew what they‟d cut off this time. The water,

probably, judging by the smell coming through the door. I

started to say something, but she‟d long lost interest,

wandering off to start some incoherent conversation with her

dead husband propped up in the comer. I shrugged to

myself, went through the door, picked my way through the

pararats and plates clotted with mould and fungus that was

probably more sentient than Mrs Gooley herself, made my

way to the main bedroom closet and pulled up the flooring.

Some nine months before, I‟d surreptitiously knocked a hole

in Mrs Gooley‟s floor, leading directly to my own apartment

below. I swung myself down.

I strolled out of the closet and looked around: my bedroom

was still in the same wrecked mess I‟d left it in, and nothing

had been touched. The sweat- and bloodstained, grubby and

unshaven mess that looked back at me from the remains of

the mirror, on the other hand, gave me pause for thought I

still had a bit of time left, so I decided that checking out

Box‟s conclusions could wait and what I really needed was to

shower off. I really wasn‟t thinking rationally at all, you see.

I came out of the bathroom dripping and considered my

discarded clothes. There was no way I was going to put them

on again, so I headed for the closet from which I‟d made my

slightly unconventional entrance and pulled it open. I was

barely aware of a pale and distended form grinning up at me,

a hand reaching for me, before the needle-like claws plunged

into my throat.

BACKGROUND 9

The openings in the face of the Sleed Incorporation led into

vaults containing vast arrays of refrigerated thermos

canisters. Their contents are well documented, being a

homogenized mass of material used in the feeding of basically

human monsters - the specific constituents being scavenged

and blended from the food supplies of the city outside, in

much the same way as the city‟s building materials had been

scavenged for the construction of the incorporation itself.

Strangely enough, given the nature of the place, relatively

little human and sentient-being material had been added to

the mix.

Neither Kara nor I could care less, at the time, what the

canisters contained. We just went through the vaults and

headed upward, looking for somewhere that seemed familiar

so we could catch our bearings and head for our ultimate

destination. The last thing I want to do at this point is detail

the three painstaking hours it took, so let me just say two

things:

The first is that, on our first visit, we had grossly

underestimated the sheer number of basically human

creatures running around on Sharabeth, and within the

incorporation, by at least a factor of ten. ARVID and the APE

operatives at the beachhead were now learning this, as wave

after wave of the things threw themselves against the

Oblivion Angel encampment with no sign of stopping. On the

plus side, this meant that the forces within the incorporation

itself were stretched thin - so far as Kara and I were

concerned, the place seemed to be even more lightly

populated than before.

The second thing is about the nature of our plan. Now,

rereading the last few virtual pages, I seem to have given the

impression that we were involved in what might not be a full-

on military assault, but still smacks a bit too much of the

sort of holomovie all action climax where our heroes go back

in with all guns blazing to get their own back, lives or deaths

hanging in the balance, that sort of thing.

It wasn‟t like that. The Oblivion Angels were going to take

control of the ruins that had once been Sharabeth and mop it

up whatever happened. The function of Kara and me was to

simply gather information and feed it back to the logistics

boys to keep the operation as neat and clean as possible, and

prevent as much loss of life on our side as was possible.

Saving the Day was not in fact an option, the day on

Sharabeth having been long since lost under its perpetually

boiling sky. We were merely in the business of cleaning up

the mess, with the minimum of toxic fumes and fallout.

The idea I‟d had was simply this: I‟d recalled the little form

I‟d been made to sign before Finley the Surgeon had

abortively attempted to perform his unconventional surgery

on me, and realized that whatever the Sleed Incorporation

had done, however extreme it was, it had been couched in

the postures of a commercial bureaucracy. Every process,

every killing would have been lovingly projected, detailed,

indexed and filed away somewhere. I envisaged a transputer

system, packed with everything the Oblivion Angels needed to

turn a fight into a walkover, just waiting for me to stream all

that info back to the logistics boys to feed through their

strategy models – and there was only one completely obvious

and logical place that such a transputer system would be...

The reason I‟ve gone into this here is that, in one sense, I

was completely and utterly wrong. Oh, there were

informational and transputronic systems here, and they were

here in abundance; it was just that they were doing a

somewhat stranger and entirely different job.

„Shit!‟ I said, with a remarkable sense of restraint, I thought,

given the circumstances. „What the hell is this shit?‟

I‟m not quite sure what I expected to find in the Executive

Boardroom. The kind of plushly functional meeting room that

the name historically suggests, maybe, or even the sort of

transputerized and viewscreened Lair where the Villain gloats

about how at last the very world is in his grasp. What I

hadn‟t expected was a vast space piled with a mismatched

collection of filing cabinets and boxes, each crammed full of

paperwork - and I‟m talking about real and actual papers,

here. I now know just how much space it would take to

contain, in physical form, every requisition form and docket

for the means to kill two billion people - I know it for the

simple reason that I‟ve seen it.

I opened a cabinet at random and pulled one of the papers

out:

I the undersigned hereby apply for gainful employment

under the auspices of Sleed Incorporated SA,

hereinafter to be referred to as the Incorporation, and

further agree to submit and perform to any such

requirement as a duly appointed officer of the

Incorporation may see fit...

„Shit!‟ I said again. This is even worse than useless. How in

God‟s name are we ever gonna pull anything meaningful out

of this lot?‟

„Here‟s something that might be useful,‟ said Kara, who had

spent the time a little more constructively by looking around

rather than blowing her top. Along the wall of an inset alcove

was a collection of folders and bound books, printed in four-

colour litho on slick, expensive-looking paper. The spines

read „Annual Report, Sleed Incorporated SA - working for a

bright new dawn!’ The dates are meaningless now, being only

locally relevant to Sharabeth when it was alive, but I saw that

these reports spanned at least fifteen local years.

Kara was flipping through one of the earlier ones. „This is

where it starts to get interesting,‟ she said, tossing the book

to me. I flipped through a copywriter-promotional preamble

that told me that the Sleed Incorporation, under the

leadership of Absolom Sleed, was an up-and-coming player in

the multiplexal world, a holding company with interests in

everything from microengineered polymers to fast food chains

to what was discreetly described as a „wide range of specialist

items for the discerning consumer‟. It further went on to say

that, since the unfortunate but unclassifiable disaster that

seemed to have cut Sharabeth off from the galaxy at large,

the Sleed Incorporation was ideally positioned to take

advantage of what was termed a radically slimmed-down

marketplace.

I flipped through the various bar charts and puff pieces

without much interest - and then I came, without warning,

upon this:

Brief #4775.2 / Paracholera Epidemic (prop.)

Vector: „Mister Meaty‟ proprietary brand donkey burgers

Application: Culture (C12) applied to burger by hand

at point of sale

Projected Conversion: 57 units/day exp...

That was just the first - there was a hell of a lot more:

children‟s toys with monomolecular filament stitching, heater

units that gave off toxic fumes engineered to produce the

precise symptoms of anaphylactic shock, comms-link units

that cumulatively fried the humanoid brain with

microwaves... I put the Annual Report back in the case with

a little shudder. I had the unconscious and uneasy feeling

that it might by itself have introduced toxins into my system.

„Didn‟t people notice?‟ I said. I suppose I sounded shocked

and puzzled, but so far as I can recall what I was feeling I

just sort of wanted to know the answer. „I mean, how could

people not notice something like that?‟

„You‟d be surprised,‟ said Kara. The greatest advance in

mass murdering over the last five hundred years was when

the mass murderers stopped telling people they were gonna

do it.‟ She shrugged - and I don‟t know to this day if that was

her way of dealing with the shock, or whether she simply

couldn‟t bring herself to be concerned over the deaths of

human types. „After all, it‟s just a minor variation on what

planetary governments have been doing since the year dot -

just think how many big wars start immediately after the sort

of technological revolutions that mean a shedding of large

parts of the workforce.‟

For my part, I couldn‟t match Kara‟s casual unconcern,

whether it was pretended or not. I gazed across the shelf of

annual reports - and noticed something odd. The last and

locally most recent consisted of a single copy, as opposed to

several identical copies grouped together. The title on the

spine was different, too. Instead of ‘working for a bright new

dawn!’ it read: ‘Welcome to the House of the Dead.’ Now, my

conscious memory and pictorial proof tell me that, apart from

the wording, this book was in no way visibly different from

the others - but something, possibly the knack I like to think

I have for integrating data from the most peripheral of

sources, had me reaching for it, drawn by something I could

not tangibly name. I just knew, inside myself, that it was

ultimately important.

And because you know this story, and probably in far more

detail than this partial and personal account, you’ll know

that the book swung down on a hinge, and the entire

bookcase slid down into the floor. There have been any

number of abstruse and complex theories advanced as to

why, in the end, things came down to such a hokey old

clichéd contrivance, theories of bluff and counterbluff that

chase their own tails until they disappear - but I personally

think, knowing something of the nature of the party involved,

that such a contrivance or something very much like it was a

flat-out inevitability.

Beyond the bookcase was a tunnel about five metres long,

its sides plastered with some crumbly substance like

quicklime or chalk. Kara and I gazed at it dubiously.

„I reckon,‟ I said at last, „that if there‟s anywhere left to go

it‟s here...‟

„You realize,‟ said Kara, „that in all reasonable probability

this leads into an incredibly nasty trap.‟

„Yeah, well, what the hell,‟ I said. „You only live once. Or

twice if you‟re lucky.‟

I walked through the tunnel, counting on my reflexes to

deal with any threat if it came - and found myself in a space

that might not have been actively threatening but was

horrible enough in its own right. A chamber that, if I‟d sat

down and thought about it, would have been precisely the

kind of Villain‟s Lair I‟d have thought up. Screens stuttered

and strobed across the walls, each showing what was

presumably the point of view from some basically human

monster. Tubes and cables snaked across the floor in

complicated tangles.

The chamber, however, was dominated by the huge, arched

stained-glass window sunk into the wall, a figurative, Pre-

Raphaelite-looking thing depicting an elderly man over which

hung a ragged and skeletal Angel of Death, placing a

Eucharist wafer in the mouth of a naked and kneeling

human supplicant. I recognized the elderly man from the

statue Finley the Surgeon had been so proud of winning.

I said that the stained-glass window dominated the room,

but that wasn‟t the thing that truly drew the eye. What drew

the eye was the... thing that was slumped before it

Its flesh was gangrene-black and swollen so that the

membrane-thin skin took on the aspect of a sausage skin on

the point of bursting, save for the face where the skin was

leathery and long-dead. Plates of glass had been sunk into its

skull to reveal the shredded, rotting brain matter, suspended

in its cranial fluid, within. Artificial lenses had been punched

into its eye sockets, the areas around them callused and

crusted with old ichor. Tubes trailed from its abdomen,

secured with ancient strips of old sticking plaster to snake off

across the floor. Its penis and one testicle had been removed

with a strangely neat and surgical precision, the remaining

item of anatomy hanging by a twisted string of sinew. From

all this anatomical wreckage, it was just possible to make out

signifying features, and the fact that this had once been the

same man as was depicted in the window and Finley the

Surgeon‟s prized statuette.

None of that was the worst of it. The worst part was that it

was still alive. It twitched, feebly. Its mouth worked.

„Muh,‟ it said. „Muh...‟

I wasn‟t consciously aware of having drawn my gun. The

first thing I knew of it was when the thing that had once been

Sleed danced to the window in a hail of blaster fire and fell

through it with a crash.

Bit of an anticlimax, basically, in the end.

CHAPTER 9

I said before that if you‟re looking for entertaining, narrative-

padding descriptions of hallucinations then you‟re looking in

the wrong place. I have to say, though, that, in the days or

hours I spent unconscious after the thing in my closet stuck

me with its claws, I experienced some belters. Images of men

with stunted parasites, spectrally roaming blasted

landscapes, infants with faces smooth as wax clutched to

them. Animated contraptions that looked like dogs, lashed

together from paint-flaking driftwood and rope. Clockwork

monkeys, bloody-fingered gods with luminous faces and eyes

filled with inhuman love that had no trace of pity, horses

under walls, fish on stilts, flying marmalade sandwiches - the

usual drill, basically. And behind it all an utter, deprisensory

gulf that terrified me, shocked me back into the time when I

was nothing but an electrostatic lattice in a Think Tank, alive

and aware and going through my own private version of Time

Travel...

It‟s difficult to tell when I became properly conscious.

Images still streamed across my eyes, disjointed and

horrifying - but I realized they were hypnagogic, excessively

strong and distinct in the same way as a candle seems

inordinately bright in the dark, and this was because I was

lying in utter darkness. I slowly realized that they were being

prompted by the voices in my head, streaming me with free-

association keywords via what felt like bead-plug earphones

that, in all probability, were also feeding me a healthy dose of

the kind of electromagnetic pulses that made people who

slept next to clock-radios think they‟d been alien-abducted. I

looked up blankly at a self-generated image of Kara‟s face,

superimposed over what appeared to be a solid wall of

tangled intestinal tubes. The face dissolved and re-formed

into another, that of Benny Summerfield, overlaid with hate

symbols...

I decided I‟d had quite enough of this.

The thing that had drawn me back to consciousness was a

sore ache in my shoulder, where the creature in the transit

station had gouged me. I concentrated upon it, built it up in

my mind until it was pure shrieking agony and then let it

expand - travelling down my arm to the hand and filling it to

bursting. The pain might have been psychosomatic, but the

feeling of it was real, if you get what I mean, and it hurt like

hell - but at least now I knew precisely where my hand was,

and broke that disconnection you feel when you can‟t quite

remember how to move. Then I reached up and pulled the

earphones out, leaving them to buzz and splutter in that

tinny little way that was probably even more irritating than

when they were in.

The images my mind was throwing up shut off as though

by a switch, leaving me alone in the dark. I lay there and

took stock, working with the secondary senses that help to

counter the removal of the standard-issue five. I was floating

in some viscous, oily liquid at blood heat, which tended to

confirm what I‟d worked out long before - I was in a sensory-

deprivation tank of some kind.

I reached up and ran my hands around the inside surface,

then shoved against it with that absolute explosion of bodily

energy that, in any reasonable world, should have had the

top flying off spectacularly. I then spent a happy few minutes

in the entirely unchanged dark, trying to work out if I‟d really

sprained every muscle in my body or not. Then I felt around

the inside of the tank again, found and ran my fingers along

what seemed to be a locked-down seam.

The time had now come to do something I had hoped I‟d

never have to do in my life. Years ago, while I was working for

the Oblivion Angels, along with the brain-shutdown switch

similar to Kara‟s that I‟d had yanked, I was implanted with

certain items as a last resort - not a suicide kit or anything

like that, on account of how I‟d rather kill myself than go

around with a suicide kit implanted in me.

One of these last-resort items was an eighty-five-millimetre-

long polyceramic tube in my left arm flush to the bone,

utilizing more or less the same techniques as the skin of a

hunter-killer drone to make it undetectable short of actual

exploratory surgery, and containing one or two long-lasting

and potentially useful items. So I bit a large chunk out of my

arm, trying to avoid as much muscle and tendon as was

possible, got a couple of fingers into the hole and pulled the

tube out. Being able to shut down pain when you don’t want

to feel it is one of the few things I know of that make life

worthwhile.

Item one was a pipette of surgical adhesive, which I used to

seal the hole as well as I could working by touch, Item two

was a little needle-light, which I clipped to my teeth. I didn‟t

feel like examining the mess I‟d made of my arm, so I turned

my head around and focused all my attention on the seam of

the tank. It was impossible to tell what kind of locking device

was being used; there were three regularly spaced bulges

down one side that I took to be the housings for hinges. Oh

well, at least I had something to aim at.

There were several other items in the tube, from micro-frag

and neurasthenic concussion caps to a spool of mono-

molecular wire, but the most important at this point was a

little lasercutter, about as big as the first joint on my index

finger, cell-powered and good for about twenty seconds of

use. I couldn‟t bend to get at the hinge nearest my feet in any

case, so I used it on the first two and, coughing and hawking

like nobody‟s business at the toxic fumes released, I

wrenched the lid open to find myself in a chamber walled

with steel plate, containing several coffin-like tanks similar to

the one I was in and crawling monsters.

They were basically human, but that made it all the worse.

And it wasn‟t like the slow, invisible and perfectly natural

transformations of evolution - it was as if the human base of

these things had been injected with some fluid that turned

their human base malleable, and they had been twisted into

these grotesque forms like silly putty, shattering the bones

and setting them in splintered clusters as they went. Their

skins were nothing but corruption, welts and ulceration.

Their eyes burnt redly. Each was individual, and horribly

distinct, but each reminded me of the thing that had

attacked me before - and the things I‟d seen ten years before.

They fell upon me. One of them -I don‟t know which it was

in the confusion and my panic - struck at me with talon-like

nails similar to those of the pale thing that had taken me in

my apartment. It really didn‟t seem to be my day for staying

conscious.

There was a noise behind me like compressed air going

through warm lard. I tried to turn my head and found that I

couldn‟t. From the feel and taste of it, my head was blocked

on either side, secured by way of bolts punched into my

cheekbones. I didn‟t feel very happy about that. I tried to

move my body and found it securely restrained by heavy

straps.

Now, in the holomovies, when the hero finds himself in

such a situation, the first thing he has to do is find the strap

with the most amount of give, drag the appropriate limb out

of it heedless of how much skin he loses, beat off the

nefarious hordes with it and use it to free himself in the nick

of time before the lasers hit the bits that mother‟s seen

before. The holomovie hero, in my informed and considered

opinion, can go and fuck himself.

There seemed to be no light beyond my closed eyelids. I

opened them - and big Kleig lights came on with a clash that

might as well have been the sound of the shattering glass

shards jammed into my eyes that the light felt like. I screwed

my eyes shut in genuine physical agony, as the lights beyond

the lids clashed off again, and, as yellow and purple

splotches exploded across my inner vision, the couch or

whatever it was I was on spun through one hundred and

eighty degrees. I then spent half a minute aspirating, before

unseen hands broke a tooth getting in a metal suction tube

and sucked the vomit out. I then lay there glumly, at what

seemed to be a slight head-upward incline, probing at the

broken tooth with my tongue and blinking furiously in the

dark because I knew damn well what was going to happen

next.

It did. The bank of lights clashed on again. A figure hazed

in front of them, but I was still too dazzled to make out any

real details.

„Why did you kill her?‟ a voice asked, in conversational

tones, probably from a speaker and in my left ear. The lights

shut down again.

„What?‟ The sudden pointlessness of the question had

startled me into simple automatic response. „What are you...?

I didn‟t kill anybody -‟

The lights came on. „You have directly killed one hundred

and fifty-seven sentient beings. Why did you kill her?‟ The

lights shut off.

Well, I might have questioned the actual figure but I

couldn‟t argue with the basic point. „Kill who, exactly, then?‟ I

said.

The lights came on. „You have four hundred and twelve

associations of varying degrees, seven close associations and

no intimate associations. Why did you kill her?‟ The lights

shut down.

I could see where this was leading, and I‟d had enough of

playing along with it. I groped for something to say, any old

thing that came into my head:

‘Set in the stormy Northern sea,’ I said.

‘Queen of these restless fields of tide,

‘England! what shall men say of thee,

‘Before whose feet the worlds divide ?’

The lights came on. „Why did you kill her?‟ The lights

shut down.

‘The earth, a brittle globe of glass,

‘Lies in the hollow of thy hand,

‘And through its heart of crystal pass,

‘Like shadows through a twilight land

The lights came on. „Why did you kill her?‟ The lights

shut down.

‘The spears of crimson-suited war,

‘The long white-crested waves of fight,

‘And all the deadly fires which are

‘The torches of the lords of Night.’

. . . . . .

‘Yet when this fiery web is spun,

‘Her watchmen shall descry from far

‘The young Republic like a sun

‘Rise from these crimson seeds of war.’

The lights came on. „Why did you kill her?‟ The lights shut

down.

„Look, this isn‟t going to do you any good, you know,‟ I said.

„I can keep right on going through the Complete Works of

Oscar Wilde, then Shakespeare, and then I‟m gonna start on

Finnegans Wake.’

The lights stayed off. Above and behind my line of sight,

halogens flickered into life. From what I could see by

swivelling my eyes, I seemed to be in a room maybe five

metres on a side and walled with the same steel plate as the

chamber in which the basically human monsters had pulled

me down. In front of me was an inset panel of black glass,

beyond which an emaciated wretch sat strapped to a

surgical-appliance-like chair with a wire dangling from his

ear - I realized I was looking at my own reflection.

From somewhere off to one side I heard the clunk and hiss

of a pressure door. Presently, the figure of a man moved into

my field of vision and just stood there before me, regarding

me. He was bald and fat and smelt of accumulated, long-

soured sweat. His body trembled, constantly, a kind of

default-setting spasm that suggested the very lip of the

collapse into complete nervous breakdown at the very least.

The armpits and crotch of his archaic-looking three-piece

business suit were stained and crusted with matter that I

could only hope was the source of the sweat smell rather

than anything else. A thick, vulcanized tube depended from

his right eye socket and snaked around to disappear

somewhere inside the folds of the jacket of his suit. The skin

under the socket was flecked with solidified pus. Apart from

that, in comparison to the basically human monsters, he

looked relatively healthy.

I‟d never seen this particular figure before in my life - but

the very shape of him, his posture and his stance, the

thousand little things that integrate into a perceived and

distinct identity, set off a pattern recognition to something I

knew like the back of my hand. And I knew, precisely, who

he was.

„That fall through the stained-glass window seems to have

agreed with you,‟ I said.

„You didn‟t think my mind was in the body you shot, did

you?‟ the man said, suavely through the innate breakdown-

tremor in his voice. Then a real spasm of what might, in an

ordinary man, have been a burst of laughter made him lurch.

The vulcanized tube detached itself and fell from his eye.

Absolom Sleed forgot me for a moment, scrabbled frantically

for it and shoved it back in.

I waited politely until he had composed himself and then

said, „No. The body I saw you using in the Executive

Boardroom was on its last legs - I don‟t think they end up

lasting very long, do they?‟

„Not very,‟ Sleed said, amiably enough. „Gangrene, lice and

suchlike, you know how it is...‟

„Quite,‟ I said. „So how did your mind escape from

Sharabeth, then?‟

„Your people - you called yourselves the Angels of the Void

or some such, didn‟t you? - took away a lot of equipment for

further study after the destruction of my sinecure. A lot of

equipment of which they didn‟t understand the purpose. To

cut a rather tiresome and convoluted sequence of events

short, it was only a matter of time before someone activated

the particular item of equipment in which, you might say, I

was contained - and since then I‟ve never looked back.‟

„I can understand that,‟ I said. „Looking back could make

your head break off, if your current body‟s any indication.‟

„I believe the pleasantries have now been dealt with to the

satisfaction of all concerned,‟ said Sleed, putting his face very

close to mine. A thread of fresh blood from his eye socket

drooled on to my face. Steeling myself against the pain in my

cheekbones, I clamped my teeth around his nose and tried to

bite it off.

„You‟re only hurting the brain inside this body, you know,‟

Sleed said, mildly, after a while. „I can‟t feel a thing.‟

I stopped biting his nose. Sleed stepped back and regarded

me with what, but for the perpetual twitching, would have

been a level gaze. „Why did you do it?‟ he asked.

„I told you,‟ I said. „I never killed any -‟

„I meant’ Sleed said a little pointedly, „why did you go back

to your apartments? Why do that when you clearly knew I

was behind events? You must have known I would have set

my minions waiting, purely for the eventuality that you might

do such an inexpressibly foolish thing.‟

I shrugged inside my straps. „Simplification. You of all

people should know about that. I wanted to cut away the

extraneous matter and head straight for the centre. I

personally couldn‟t give a shit about the specifics of how

you‟ve been sewing poisoned razor blades into children‟s

toys, organizing the production of viewscreens so they put

out dirty-level radiation - and what the hell are you doing

now?‟

Sleed had pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket

and was writing in it with a stylus. „Making a note of the

viewscreen notion,‟ he said. „That hadn‟t occurred to me.‟

„Yeah, well,‟ I said. „Just remember I get a royalty on every

unit sold. In any case, I needed to simplify things fast, and,

once I knew who you were and what I was up against, I knew

that meant thinking in a different way. You‟re clever, and

cleverer than me in most respects, I‟ll grant you that, but

you‟re also the nearest thing I‟ve come across in real life to a

holomovie Villain - I mean, you can even use the word

“minions” with a straight if somewhat rotted face for fuck‟s

sake - and on a certain, fundamental level that makes you a

little bit inept. I knew that if I set myself up blatantly you

wouldn‟t be able to resist playing the game, so here I am.‟

Sleed had listened to my explanation with slightly palsied

impassiveness. „And now that you‟re here...?‟

„Do you know,‟ I said, „I really didn‟t think that far ahead. I

just hoped something would turn up. It hasn‟t. Oh well, are

you gonna kill me or what?‟

„Oh, you‟ll die,‟ said Sleed, „but not quite yet. I have certain

plans for you first, plans that will remove another irritant in

the same breath. Thus two more obstacles will be removed,

simultaneously, in furtherance of my greater end...‟

„The greater end?‟ I said. „What do you get out of this

greater end? Sharabeth or here. I mean, when you come right

down to it, what‟s the point?‟ I had no real interest in what

the point was, or not by now: I was merely stringing Sleed

along because engaging him in conversation was marginally

preferable to the nasty things I had the distinct idea were

going to come.

„Why, control, of course,‟ Sleed said, as if it were the most

simple and obvious thing in the world. He waved a hand

vaguely, encompassing the whole world. „You people think

I‟m in the business of indiscriminate killing, but that is not

the case. The ground must be prepared, undesirable

elements weeded out, the correct medium for control

established. That pure medium for control is all my kind

have, ultimately, ever wanted...‟

„Your kind?’ I exclaimed, despite myself, as certain things

that had hitherto remained obfuscated became clear. I was

kicking myself mentally for not having seen the ultimate

truth of matters long before now - and kicking myself even

harder for my outburst, which I had instantly realized was a

mistake.

„The kind of man I am,‟ said Sleed, barely fumbling the

catch. „A man with fundamental clarity of purpose.‟

„A complete and total loony, you mean,‟ I said sourly. Sod

stringing him along and prolonging the conversation. „You

can do what you like to me, Sleed, but I‟ll never help you. I‟ll

find a way. You really ought to kill me now if you‟re going to.‟

Sleed gave another one of those spastic lurches of laughter.

„Oh, as I said, you‟ll die. I, however, am not going to kill you,

and neither are my minions, as such, much as they might

enjoy the treat. You‟ll be tried by the full weight of Proximan

consensus law and then hanged, injected, electrocuted or

shot, depending upon which concern has the honour of doing

it.‟

Two of Sleed‟s basically human minions, moving like

puppets, retracted the surgical chair so I was lying flat and

checked the bonds that were securing me, tightening the

bolts in my cheekbones with little spanners so that my head

was even further immobilized than before.

„This is by no means a lobotomy,‟ the voice of Sleed said

from somewhere behind me and off to one side. The

microsuture appliance is omnidirectional, with a variable

level of cauterization. Properly controlled, it can restructure

the brain at a rate of seven million synapse reassignments

per standard second.‟

„The breath do catch,‟ I said. „The heart do pitty-pat.‟

From behind me, something cold was pressed against my

forehead, and then I felt the even colder burn of something

shooting through it.

„What the fuck was that?‟ I shouted. I felt, under the

circumstances, that I was allowed a small and uncouth

shout.

„Your prefrontal lobes are being saturated with a

magnesium suspension,‟ Sleed explained, somewhat chattily.

„The restructured cells are physically dead, of course, and

thus I need an electroactive medium for when I insert a

portion of, shall we say, my essence, and subsume certain

parts of your identity.‟

„Magnesium?‟ I said. „Charming. Anybody lights a match

and I‟ll end up feeling somewhat light-headed.‟

„The bloodstream will flush the magnesium from you in a

matter of days,‟ Sleed continued, consolingly, „and my

influence will dissipate with it, leaving you, unfortunately, in

a vegetative state - but, of course, you‟ll have been executed

long before then in any case.‟

„Thanks for reminding me,‟ I said. „I don‟t suppose you want

to lay bare all the intricacies of your Master Plan in detail

while you‟re about it, do you?‟

The sound of yet another lurch-chuckle. „I really don‟t think

that would be appropriate,‟ said Sleed. „I‟m mindful of what

you said about my being a true Villain - and we all know

what happens to Villains after they do that, do we not?‟

„Oh, go on,‟ I said. „You know you want to. Have a good

gloat and get it out of your system.‟

Sleed made what was presumably the equivalent of a

sucking sound with his teeth. „I‟ll tell you what,‟ he said, „I‟ll

tell you certain minutiae, such as concerns you personally,

as soon as we‟ve sawn the top of your head off.‟

Now, listen, the above comes across as though I was lying

there, cool as an oogli fruit and not giving half a toss what

was happening to me. Outwardly I was calm and making it

with the witty banter because, in the circumstances, there

was absolutely nothing else I could do. On another, inner,

level, my mind was scrabbling around in agonized horror,

desperately pawing through itself, looking for something,

anything, that could comfort or save it. I could feel the bare

shape of a memory as my mind clawed at the edges of it, a

tip-of-the-tongue thing that seemed somehow important, but

I couldn‟t quite get hold of it for the life of me. Something

about holding your breath underwater, or schizophrenia, or

something like that...

„…more strain, in the cumulative sense, than you fully

realized,‟ the voice of Sleed was saying. „Over the course of

months, the strain simply became too great and you

underwent a severe mental and emotional collapse. In that

fugue state, four days ago, you broke into Kara Delbane‟s

apartment with the intention of having it out with her, lost

control of yourself and brutally murdered her.‟

(Schizophrenia? Duality? When I was one, I’d just begun.

When I was two, I was nearly new...)

„This set a psychotic pattern. The emotions of romantic

intimacy became confused with the urge to kill. This,

combined with a reversion to an adolescent mental state, led

to any woman who associated even marginally close to you

becoming the focus of your rather squalid, atavistic

fantasies...‟

(When I was three, I was hardly me.)

„The first such woman was Bernice Summerfield -

ironically, perhaps, because of her assistance in your so-

called investigation of the murder of Kara Delbane. Four days

after that first murder, you sexually assaulted and murdered

Bernice Summerfield...‟

(When I was four, I was not much more.)

„In your confused and regressive mental state, you thought

you should report this murder. You went straight to the

nearest Security Service station and confessed outright. You

fully expected to be congratulated upon and admired for your

honesty. Instead, you were summarily tried and executed.‟

(When I was five, I was just alive.)

Talking is slightly more difficult than somewhat when

you‟re trying to stop your brains falling out and slopping on

the floor by sheer force of will. „Is that the best you can do?

There‟s holes in the story you could drive a road train

through.‟ I thought about it. „Then again, I don‟t think the

Secman‟s been born who‟d quibble about it with a signed

statement in front of him.‟

„There‟ll be more evidence than that,‟ said Sleed. „You left

more than enough DN A material and other evidence in Kara

Delbane‟s apartment to place you there. And, of course, there

will be the recorded evidence of you actually committing the

murder of Bernice Summerfield.‟

„I‟d like to see how you could possibly arrange that,‟ I said.

(But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six

now for ever and ever.)

„Oh you will,‟ said Sleed. „You‟ll see it from the inside.‟

There was no sensation. A vague blurring of my vision just

expanded it to fill it with the kind of grainy static you get

when a mistuned viewscreen is putting out white noise, and

then there was nothing at all.

BACKGROUND 10

There‟s really not much else to say, so far as my direct

involvement with the events on Sharabeth goes. The

occupation of the planet took around three standard days,

the process being made somewhat easier than otherwise due

to the fact that, with the death of Sleed, the basically human

monsters that were his creations fell into confusion. They

were still dangerous, could and did kill several of the

invading troops, but they lacked a sense of mass cohesion on

any level higher than an animal pack.

The methods by which Sleed had transformed basically

human monsters - methods that, apparently, involved

ergotropic drugs, nanonetic cytoplasmic modification,

mutagenic chemical treatments, certain items of equipment

in the Engenesis Room and something else, some essence of

Sleed himself, that remains ultimately unclassifiable - the

methods by which Sleed had transformed them had

destroyed their brains beyond any hope of their being

recovered as the individuals they once might have been, so

they were put out of their misery wholesale. What with my

own deep-seated confusion as to what constitutes „humanity‟

or not, I have absolutely no idea what to think about this.

The basic facts of how Sharabeth was transformed after

being dislocated in time slowly came to light upon

examination of the records in the Executive Boardroom. The

long version of that would fill thousands of virtual pages, but

the short version goes more or less like this: under the

auspices of his incorporation, Sleed flooded the Sharabeth

commercial marketplace with lethal items designed to

winnow out the population on an exponential basis that, by

the time people realized what was happening, had weakened

the population to such an extent that it was possible to finish

the job overtly with wholesale slaughter by the basically

human monsters. The surprising thing, however, was not the

basic fact or scale of it - such large-scale „cleansings‟ have

happened at certain times and places throughout the galaxy.

The unique factor here seems to have been the absolute lack

of any kind of motive - there were certain complexities, as

there always are in real life, but what it seems to have come

down to is that Sleed (and no other name for him exists in

the records) set it all in motion because he could - like the

sort of holomovie Villain who acts villainously for the sole

reason that villains do.

As for myself and Kara, after the dust had settled, I learnt

something of how we had been manipulated - me, in

particular - in what was in effect a bit of experimental

temporal

engineering.

Again,

there

were

real-life

complications involved, but in basic terms the idea was for

us to provide a fix for the miniature wormhole that allowed

the Angels‟ ground forces access to Sharabeth, two days

before we went there in the first place. Indeed, during a large

portion of our time on the Ship, there were duplicate versions

of us on it, too - in large part that‟s why I in particular was

kept completely isolated, so far as is possible, while still

being prodded through the maze into which I‟d been sent.

The technical specifics of the process are left as an exercise

for the reader - i.e., it‟s late and I can‟t be arsed to work it all

out on paper for myself.

After the dust had settled on the Sharabeth affair, of

course, I was properly inducted into the Angels proper, and

learnt that everything Kara had said about APEs being

treated like shit was true. For some years after, I was put to

work, the details of which aren‟t important here and now -

until I started to intimate something of the true nature of my

masters, and what with one thing and another became

instrumental in the sequence of events that ultimately tore

the Oblivion Angels apart. Half the populated galaxy knows

about that, and was affected by it, and if you don‟t know then

you can count yourself lucky.

In the end, so far as I knew at the time, the events on

Sharabeth were just a set of incidents that were the first

among many to be finished with and put away. And life went

on.

CHAPTER 10

Sleed had me taken to one of the access points of Braxiatel‟s

establishment on autopilot. It was one I hadn‟t seen before, a

portable transmat arch behind the fake wall of a public

restroom cubicle that deposited me inside the complex itself.

An APE was waiting for me, one of the few with whom Sleed

had infiltrated the Braxiatel organization to provide him with

information on its workings, and for situations such as this.

They hadn‟t been conditioned like the other people Sleed

controlled; they were simply doing a job and being paid for it.

APEs work for anyone who pays them.

I could tell by the way he was looking at me that this APE

was one of those who‟d broken their programming and think

they‟re alive. I hate that, the way they run around demanding

rights and privileges, and simply not getting the fact that,

however much they might pretend they think and feel real

things, they just will never be as good as a real man. The

materials might not be steel and silicon and polymer, but

they‟re things made by us to serve us, and they should damn

well act like that.

„My name‟s Craven,‟ he said, as if what he‟d decided to call

himself made any difference at all. „I‟m here to take care of

you. I‟ve knocked out the security systems on our route, so

there shouldn‟t be any trouble getting you where you need to

go.‟

That was very good. I remembered that there were other

people here, though, people I had to avoid at all costs. „What

about Braxiatel?‟ I asked him, trying to keep the contempt

out of my voice. These things can get touchy if you insult

them, and for the moment I needed this „Craven‟ on my side.

„What about Mira?‟

„You won‟t bump into them,‟ Craven said. „Braxiatel never

leaves his apartments that I‟ve ever known about, and that

mind-reader girl‟s off site.‟ He gave what he thought was a

chuckle but was in fact an incredibly fake and put-on parody

of a human laugh, because he thought that was what a real

human should do at that point „She‟s out looking for you, as

it happens, everywhere other than here...‟

I got the feeling that this Craven was now going to try to

chat, just like he thought real people did, so I cut him off.

„That‟s all I need. Take me to her.‟

Craven sniffed in a snotty and affectedly camp way - these

things, not having any real feelings of their own, have a kind

of sexual ambivalence about them that I find repugnant.

They just don‟t seem to get that real people are straight or

gay and nothing in between. It‟s a basic depth of feeling that

they‟ll never understand.

„I‟ll take you there, then,‟ he said.

As I followed the APE through the corridors, I rehearsed I in

my mind all the things I was going to do to Summerfield. The

bitch had it coming to her, after all the things she‟d done to

me, and she was finally going to get what she deserved. I

touched the scars on my head and arm. She‟d done those,

her and those little throwing knives of hers, in some weird

way I couldn‟t quite at this point put my finger on - but that

hadn‟t been the worst of it. I‟d been hurt in other ways by

that snobby, snotty, oh-so-superior little bitch, and now it

was payback time...

We reached the med centre. Praetorian was there, as I‟d

known he would be, feeding in commands to the console that

monitored the various rooms.

„No problems,‟ he said, not bothering to turn around and

look at us as we entered. „I was able to counter their active

sedation long enough for them to go away and let me change

the settings.‟

That was the reason Sleed had used him, I knew. While

being fundamentally human, Praetorian had a certain genetic

mutation, augmented by the influence of Sleed, that allowed

him to control consciously and absolutely the physical

processes of his body, up to and including the basic impulses

of his brain. This had allowed him to produce a state of

unconsciousness within himself, to evidence all the physical

symptoms of brain damage, even in the face of advanced

medical monitoring and the mind-scanning capabilities of

someone like Mira. This had allowed him to be placed here,

until the time was right for him to be activated.

„I‟ve dealt with a potential complication,‟ Praetorian said,

nodding a head absently to where the form of Chris Cwej lay

slumped in the comer of the observation room. „He was good,

and fast, and I think I‟ve got some internal injuries that

might need treatment when I let them happen, but he won‟t

give us any trouble for a while.‟

„He‟s not dead?‟ I said. I didn‟t care either way, but I didn‟t

want him waking up and charging in while I was giving

Summerfield what she deserved.

„I‟ve sedated him,‟ Praetorian said. „The same compound

they were going to give to me. It seemed a shame to waste it.

It would be better if he stays alive, though, I think, to find the

recorded evidence of her when you... I‟ve given him a

neurasthenic to wipe an hour out of his life. He‟ll come out of

it, see what‟s on the screen and assume it was you who

incapacitated him.‟

Praetorian finished his work on the console, and finally

turned around to face us directly. I saw a couple of livid

bruises on his face, no doubt given to him by Cwej in the

struggle to subdue him.

„I‟ve cut the output to all other systems and set up a

camera at the right angle,‟ he said. „The recording will show

precisely what we want it to. You‟re ready to go.‟

I became aware that the APE, Craven, was still in the room.

The things I wanted to do to Summerfield felt obscurely

personal and private, and, whether they were recorded or

not, the last thing I wanted to have was some APE see them.

„Can you get this thing out?‟ I said to Praetorian.

„I think you should go about your other duties, now,‟

Praetorian said to the APE. „He‟s primed and fixated and I

don‟t want anything that might break it. I should be perfectly

safe while the scenario plays out.‟

The APE left. Praetorian led me to the room where

Summerfield lay.

„You know, I certainly don‟t envy you,‟ he said. „Dealing

with such cold and unresponsive material.‟

„You like them live and wriggling?‟ I said.

„Oh yes.‟ A degree of heat infused the mind behind

Praetorian‟s eyes. „The woman Delbane, for instance, she was

a fascinating study. I knew from the moment I saw her that I

had to... process her, just to see how she would react. It was

easy to slip her just enough information that our master

would decide to have her summarily removed.‟ His face fell a

little. „Of course, she managed to cheat me, shut down her

own mind just as I was warming up...‟

I‟d had enough of Praetorian‟s ramblings. They were

keeping me from doing what I needed to do. „Stay here,‟ I told

him curtly. „I have a job to do. And believe me, when I get

through with her she‟ll be responsive as anything.‟ I went

into the private room.

Summerfield lay there, to all intents and purposes dead to

the world. The little bitch wasn‟t going to get away with it

that easily - I knew that there was something alive in there

somewhere. There‟s a nerve just under the earlobe that, with

the correct pressure, produces the kind of utter, shrieking

agony that cannot be ignored if so much as a shred of

conscious awareness remains. I dug in my thumbnail and

twisted it.

Summerfield screamed and spasmed violently, began to

flail weakly around in that disjointed, uncoordinated way

that people have when coming out of sleep. I gave her a

couple of slaps, hauled her up off the bed and flung her at

the wall. She hit the bracket of the security camera, bent it at

a sad angle and ended up in a tangled, moaning heap on the

floor.

I strode over to her and slapped her again. She was awake

now, her eyes open and tracking me with blank terror. Her

mouth worked slackly, trying to make sounds, as though

anything she could say at this point might save her scrawny

neck. I grabbed her by the scruff of it and hauled her away

from the wall.

„Now,‟ I said and shifted my consciousness into one of the

backup areas of my brain, one that Sleed‟s restructuring

hadn‟t touched.

„Bloody hell,‟ I said. „I‟m gonna have to lock that lot off for

months until it sorts itself out. Thank God for APE

regeneration processes is all I can say...‟

I realized that Benny was still cowering away from me in

terror. The thread of control I‟d retained under Sleed‟s

preprogramming hadn‟t let me hurt her all that much, but

being wrenched from a comatose state and slapped around is

hardly the best way to start the day for anybody.

„Look, it‟s OK,‟ I said, raising my hands placatingly and

backing off with the kind of body language that said I wasn‟t

going to go near her again. „It‟s OK. I had to go along with the

act until I‟d put that out of action.‟ I gestured towards the

damaged camera. It was at that point that my mind got

sidetracked, in the way minds sometimes do, by the fact that

I was wearing the clothes I‟d discarded just before I‟d been

captured. Fortunately, I‟d been naked in the sensory-

deprivation tank, and for the surgical procedures on my

head, but that didn‟t help the fact that the clothing was

basically worn, bloodstained and ruined.

„Oh, dear God,‟ I said. „Will you look at that? My outfit‟s

totally knackered.‟

Perhaps it was because it‟s remarkably difficult to feel

threatened by somebody fussing over their state of attire, but

Benny was remarkably quick on the uptake - I knew

something of her life, but I would later learn that a large part

of it had been spent in situations so extreme as to make the

current one, if not a walk in the park, at least on the level of

an orienteering course with a good pair of boots. She climbed

shakily to her feet and leant against the wall. She looked

decidedly unwell, and not just from the recent shock or, I felt

obscurely, the effects of being recently comatose.

„OK,‟ she said. „It was all part of the act, and one of these

days I might just forgive you for it. At the moment - I‟m too

tired to care.‟

„What‟s wrong with you?‟ I asked. „I mean, what is it that‟s

really wrong with you? I gathered it was some kind of brain

thing, but nobody was giving me the details.‟

Benny scowled. „It‟s because of that Mary-Sue I had done,

the personality wipe-and-replace. The problem is that the

bootleg medic didn‟t prime the wiping protocols properly to

eradicate themselves after they‟d done their job. They were

lying in me, dormant - and then I caught a form of mind

virus that activated them again. They‟ve been proliferating

through me ever since, and it‟s only a matter of time before

they dump their pay load.‟ She shrugged. „If I‟m lucky, it‟ll

just shut down my brain and kill me on the spot.‟

I didn‟t quite know what to think about that. Not guilty,

precisely, because the Mary-Sue procedure as such had been

nothing to do with me, but there was an obscure sense of

embarrassment for having been around at the time.

„How long have you got?‟ I said before I could bite my lip

and stop it. The last thing Benny probably wanted to do was

actually think about it. Even if the thing that was eating her

mind left her with the automatic physical impulses, and even

if some new and self-aware personality could be established

in the blank that had been left behind, the person known as

Bernice Summerfield would be dead.

„I‟m on borrowed time as we speak.‟ Benny forced herself to

shrug in a funny little way that seemed to be the opposite of

the more usual motion: it was like she was putting on the

burden of the world and testing its weight rather than letting

things slide off. „But I‟m not going to let it get me till I‟ve

finished the job,‟ she said with a new sense of purpose. „So

what are we going to do now?‟

I thought about it. „Well, after I‟ve killed you, I gather that

I‟m supposed to lapse into a kind of childlike semi-conscious

state. That guy Praetorian - who‟s up and about, now, by the

way - is then supposed to get me out and take me to various

security people. I say we go along with that for a little while.

If you wait here a few minutes and follow me down to the car

pool, I should have been able to sort something out.‟

Benny nodded dubiously. „I suppose I should call Brax and

let him know what‟s happened...‟

„Not a good idea,‟ I said. „Not from inside this building at

any rate. The place has more plants knocking around than a

botanical hydroponic facility after a fertilizer explosion, and

we don‟t even know how many there are.‟

Benny lay against the wall where she could feign the

postures of death if needed, and I left the room as though

dazed. I rebounded vaguely off a couple of med-centre

corridor walls until I came face to face with Praetorian.

„I was coming to check if things were all right,‟ he said, a

little suspiciously. „After we lost the camera I got a little

worried.‟

„The old cow hit me,‟ I said petulantly. „She hit me hard. So

I hit her back, and now she don‟t move no more...‟

„That‟s very good,‟ Praetorian said, with fatherly

condescension. He was still looking at my face a little

dubiously, and there was one of those little edge-moments

where I knew he was going to go and check on the body, just

to make sure.

„Want to go for a drive,‟ I said.

„Yes, well, I think we -‟

„Want to go for a drive now!’

Praetorian considered his options, and evidently decided

that, whether I were in full possession of the marbles or not,

an APE on the verge of throwing a violent tantrum would just

have to be humoured.

„Very well,‟ he said. „We‟ll go for a little drive.‟

I made my face light up with a sunny little grin. „Can I

pretend to drive the car?‟

Praetorian nodded paternally. „We‟ll see. If you‟re good.‟

„I‟m going to dri-ive!‟ I sang happily. „I‟m going to dri-ive! I‟m

going to dri-ive...‟ I made a little bet with myself that I could

keep this up at least twice as long as he could stand it.

I think it was my shouting „Wheee!‟ at the top of my lungs

in the drop shaft that finally made Praetorian snap. I thought

he was going to try to hit me, but instead he said, „I‟m going

to take you to the SecServ™ station, now.‟

Since this was one of the precise triggers Sleed‟s

restructuring process had implanted me with, there wasn‟t

much I could convincingly do about it. I gave my face a slack

and switched-off quality. „All right. One, two, three, four...‟

„What the hell are you doing now?‟ Praetorian snapped

angrily.

„Counting,‟ I said. „Five, six, seven, eight...‟

Praetorian gave himself what looked like a nastily split

thumbnail in opening up the car he‟d chosen. „And why are

you counting?‟ he asked as my voice droned on behind him.

I made a feeble, blatting motion with my hand. “Cause

when I get to thirty I‟m going to hit you. Fifteen, sixteen,

seventeen, eighteen...‟

Praetorian was now at the end of his rope. „Just you do

that,‟ he muttered, fumbling with the car door. „Just you try.‟

„All right I will. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine,

thirty.’

I smacked him on that spongy mass of bone at the back of

the head, directing the force to shatter it and drive it deep

inside and, incidentally, to explode his eyes out of their

sockets. I suppose I could have just knocked him out or

something, but I really didn‟t feel like it. This guy had killed

Kara, so he said, and, even if it was a lie dropped in as some

specific bit of disinformation, then it wasn‟t the sort of thing

he should have said to me and he deserved what he bloody

got. Besides, you couldn‟t say I hadn‟t warned him.

I‟d dragged the body out of the way and left it behind a

nearby charging rack by the time Benny arrived. She‟d come

in the elevator rather than the express tubes - I had the

vague idea that the gravmetics of the tubes would exacerbate

her worsened condition, or at least that she thought so. She

had found a set of clothes from somewhere, sloppy-looking

sweats and a polymerized jacket that was almost ridiculously

too big for her. I never bothered to ask, then or later, where

she‟d got them, sartorial disasters not being one of the things

on my „important‟ list.

„What‟s that you‟ve got on you?‟ she asked.

„Just a bit of blood,‟ I said. „Don‟t worry, it‟s not mine. Mr

Praetorian won‟t be joining us for the remainder of the trip.‟

„You know, you‟ve really got that B-movie thug act down

pat,‟ said Benny.

„You have no idea,‟ I said, „how hurtful and insulting that

was.‟

„You‟ll get over it.‟ Benny looked in vague horror at the car,

where certain minor bits of the late Mr Praetorian had

landed. „And just where are we going, precisely?‟

„For the moment, I just want to get out from under and get

away,‟ I said.

„Fine plan.‟ Benny nodded with that mock brightness

common to those who have just been told the completely

bleeding obvious. „And where are we going after that?‟

„I have a few thoughts on that,‟ I said. „I‟ll tell you when

we‟re clear, but I‟ll give you a clue now. Sleed‟s modus

operandi on Sharabeth was to infiltrate lethal devices

throughout the population in the guise of consumer

products. I think he‟s trying something along those lines here

in the Proximan Chain. So where‟s the single most obvious

place to go and check out something like that?‟

CHAPTER 11

The ZipCo™ building was situated in the commercial zone of

a planetary Habitat that, in spatial terms, was almost dead in

the centre of the Chain - though if I‟d had my way, and

purely for cosmetic reasons, I‟d have preferred it to be in

some comer as far out of the way as possible. It‟s a

cylindrical tower, from which radiate five blocks, finished in

that concrete that goes mildewed and streaky after a few

years, and is able to be reformulated in this day and age only

by sheer conscious and bloody-minded effort. The

proportions of the thing were in a style known as the

Vernacular of Obstructionalism, which is architects‟ argot for

scrupulously noting absolutely every element of aesthetic

merit and just as carefully removing the lot of „em. Historical

Soviet architecture is the Taj Mahal in party streamers

compared with it. The thing was a local navigational

landmark, in the sense that it was something to be avoided

at all costs and an overdraft loan on top.

„Good Goddess, that has to be one of the most depressing-

looking buildings I‟ve ever seen in my life,‟ said Benny,

sourly, looking at it through the window of the car.

„I‟ve seen better,‟ I admitted, „I‟ll admit. You want to go in?‟

Benny shuddered with a revulsion that, in the end, wasn‟t

all that theatrical. „I suppose we better had.‟

Now, at this point, the only plan we had in mind was to get

inside the building and have a bit of a nose around. Second-

storey work was out of the question, and it wasn‟t as if we

were going in with big guns blazing for some final and

spectacular confrontation with the Evil Villains in their lair.

We were going in armed with the formidable weapon of a

convoluted story about how we‟d ordered some rather

sensitive and dubious items from the bastards and they had

yet to arrive. Receipts and other suchlike proof were

irrelevant, since the last thing we actually wanted to come

out with was a bag of dubiously sensitive items. So, armed

with this unassailable untruth about the misery of our fives

due to the lack of a set of inflatable silicon-gel anacondas, we

girded our loins, quashed our fear of contracting terminal

sick-building syndrome and entered the main ground-floor

reception of the nearest block in search of Customer

Complaints.

I‟m not sure what I was expecting - and in the back of my

mind, even despite myself, I had the vague idea of every

ZipCo™ worker recognizing us and instantly pulling out a

bunch of heavy-duty pulse pumps, or instantly turning into

the basically human monsters I‟d encountered while being

the captive of Sleed. What I hadn‟t expected was for the place

to be completely and utterly deserted. There were the basic

forms of a reception desk, a number of benchlike seats, the

occasional empty plant pot presumably waiting for a pot

plant, but no sign of any living thing. Our footsteps rattled off

blank walls with a kind of mausoleum sound as we headed

for the elevators and gravmetic shafts. Neither were working:

the power supply to them was off.

The emergency stairs were chained up and locked with

heavy and archaic-looking padlocks. There‟s a trick to

dealing with them with a little bit of [method of unlocking

padlocks removed] but, since I didn‟t have a little bit of

[method of unlocking padlocks removed], I had to force them

by hand. I sprained a couple of fingers, and the muscle strain

popped the wound in my left arm open again, but I had to

work with what I had.

There was no way we were going to be able to search the

entire building, so I settled for simply climbing a few flights of

stairs, keeping an eye on Benny for signs of her tiring, with

the idea of stopping if it looked like being too much for her.

She was struggling on gamely, but her breathing was harsh

and her eyes looked like a pair of a certain kind of holes in

the snow.

As we climbed, though, I noticed something else. I stopped

and gazed up the full height of the stairwell. „Take a look at

this,‟ I said to Benny.

She followed my gaze. „Take a look at what? I can‟t see

anything.‟

„You haven‟t got my eyes.‟ I put my hands together and

rocked them back and forth, wincing as the action made

their minor injuries hurt. „The block sways outward, more

than the standard wind-factoring should allow. It doesn‟t

sway inward.‟

Benny seemed entirely uninterested in the lateral-to-

perpendicular relationships of motion in tower blocks. „So

maybe the central tower stops it.‟

„Only if it were solid - and the construction didn‟t look like

that.‟

We left the stairwell and entered one of the levels proper,

and found ourselves in what looked like a still life of an office,

of the incorporate sort that provides all those under its wing

with the postures of productive work. Desks and transputer-

equipment and even food and drinks dispensers, each with

that strange dated look that business stuff gets after a few

years, no matter how dynamic and sexy it looked at the time

it was new, and all, without exception, unpowered. There

wasn‟t even a powered light source, the scene being

illuminated by a warmish light coming from frosted-glass

windows. There was something vaguely disorienting about

those windows, and it took me a second or two to pin it

down: the windows were on the wall that joined the block this

office was in to the central tower - a place from which, on

most reasonable counts, no light should come.

My mind turned in an obvious direction. „An unguarded

place like this, I‟d have thought this stuff would have been

ripped off years ago.‟

„Years ago, possibly,‟ Benny said, „but not now.‟ She wrote

her name in the dust on top of a transputer unit - grime-

particulate dust, I noticed, rather than the shed skin cells

that would come from habitation - and ended it up with a

little heart, which I thought seemed totally uncharacteristic

of her without quite knowing why. „None of this equipment is

actually current.‟

„Yeah,‟ I allowed, „but think of the scrap value alone. The

stuff inside...‟

Another thought struck me - or rather, I think, one of

certain things that I‟d already suspected, and already worked

out on some deep level, bubbled up and made itself known. I

unlatched the transputer unit and pulled open the casing.

„There‟s nothing there,’’ Benny exclaimed, not suspecting

what I did and thus being slightly more surprised.

„Not exactly,‟ I said. „You see those bubble circuits on the

inside? They provide a basic functionality so that customs

people and the like think it‟s the real thing, leaving you one

hell of a lot of space to put in what you like. It‟s an old trick

for smugglers with drugs, or terrorists with bombs - though I

very much doubt you‟d find a trace of either in this thing

with a spectroscope as big as the world.‟ I slapped the almost

empty transputer casing. „I think this is just doing in a small

way what this entire place is doing in a big way. It‟s just a

front.‟

Benny frowned in thought. „Then where does all the

ZipCo™ merchandising come from?‟

„Hmm.‟ I thought of all the ubiquitous ads for things that

nobody in their right minds could ever need or want. „Have

you ever bought something from them? Has anyone you

know bought something?‟

Again, Benny frowned. I got the impression that even these

simple processes were requiring a supreme effort on her part,

now. I didn‟t know whether to bring her attention to it or not.

„No...‟ she said at last, „but the scale‟s too big, isn‟t it?

Nothing like that could possibly work.‟

„You‟d be surprised,‟ I said. „I can think of a few ways to do

it, and all you really need is organization.‟ I took in the whole

office with a gesture. „So what we have here is a corporate

entity that produces and sells nothing, and whose only

visible assets are a building that wobbles outward but

doesn‟t wobble in. I think I‟d really like to know why that is.‟

I picked up the all-but-empty transputer unit and hefted it,

judged it was just about heavy enough, carried it over to one

of the frosted-glass windows and threw it. The ZipCo™

building had, in the final analysis, been built with the sort of

concern for human habitation that included suicide-proof

windows as the last thing on its mind: the window shattered

with a satisfyingly spectacular crash.

I looked down through the hole, into the base of the central

tower and what seemed to be a massive mirrored cone,

presumably of monomolecular ceramic, its surface mirror

bright because it was utterly smooth. It was lit by some

bright and multiple overhead light source, the angle of the

cone such that I couldn‟t make out from where the light was

coming in the reflection. And then I looked up, to the

multiple source. „Oh damn.‟

Benny joined me and followed my gaze. „I saw that story on

GalNet,‟ she said at last, in a small voice. „I thought they‟d

been found.‟

„Only two of them,‟ I said in a voice not that much bigger.

„They only recovered two.‟

Now I can go on about the subconscious and the deeper

levels of thinking all I like, but in the end the humiliating

truth is that, quite frankly, I‟m just not half so clever as I like

to think. I can think of things and put things together,

congratulating myself on my perspicacity all the while, but I

never seem to get the true facts of matters properly until they

tum around and bite me on the arse.

I‟d intimated that ZipCo™ was a „phantom‟ company, but I

hadn‟t quite pegged the vital, fundamental distinction. A

phantom is usually set up to acquire money by nefarious

means, and this was the precise opposite. Money and

resources had been sunk into a concern that promoted

products that were never made or sold, for the sole purpose

of establishing the idea of that company as existing in the

collective Proximan Chain mind. As a secondary function,

this diverted suspicion from what was really going on -

remembering Sharabeth, I‟d been looking around for

exploding burgers, spike-sprung binoculars and the like, all

the while thinking I was oh-so clever for having seen through

one level of misdirection, while being quite unaware that I

was participating in another. The secondary function of

ZipCo™, quite simply, was to keep people like me off the

scent.

The primary function, on the other hand, was to build the

ZipCo™ tower, which was nothing but a massive amplifier for

the mutagen bomb hanging in its centre.

Later, when the dust had settled, we were able to learn the

specifics of the thing, the schematic details that made it

work. The operation of it in general, though, was obvious

from first glance. The sides of the building‟s radiating blocks,

butting in flush with the walls of the central tower, were lined

with transmat hoops, solid-state active, and it was from these

that the light to see by came. Hanging in the tower „shaft‟ was

a smallish command-triggered thermonuclear device -

„smallish‟ being a purely relative term of course - and

beneath this hung a containment tank for concentrated

mutagenic compounds crawling with hazchem symbols and

sigils.

There would be no countdown or warning, because

countdowns and warnings just don‟t happen in real life.

Could be weeks or months. Could be seconds. The bomb

would detonate, splaying open the radiating blocks and

vaporizing the mutagens, the force of the blast driving them

down to be rechannelled by the planes of the walls into the

transmats. I had no evidence as to where the transmats were

set to transmaterialize, but I had a nasty thought that

achieved the status of an absolute certainty. The entire setup

was designed, before it blew itself apart and took the local

zone with it, to catastrophically flood the major Habitats of

the Chain with its payload. It was the difference between

elegance of concept and subtlety of execution. The elegance

of Sleed‟s basic conception had now allowed him to achieve

his ends in one bludgeoning and brutal sweep.

„There‟s nothing we can do.‟ Benny seemed on the verge of

collapse, not in the physical way she‟d been after the

bombing incident, but in a state of complete and irrevocable

despair. „There‟s nothing. It could go off at any time, and

there‟s no way the whole of Proxima could be evacuated, and

if they see it happening they‟ll detonate it anyway...‟

Personally, I was staring around in a kind of blank shock,

thinking harder and more desperately than I ever had in my

life. And, having beaten my breast about not exactly being

the fruitiest wine in the rack, I have to say that just

occasionally my mind does throw something useful up, if

only by the law of averages. The thought was elusive,

something about the office we were in, something about our

positioning in general... and then I had it.

„Listen,‟ I said. „Benny, please, snap out of it and listen to

me.‟ It was only later that I realized that this was the first

time ever I‟d used her most familiar name out loud - no big

deal: it had just seemed a bit uneasily presumptuous to use

it. There was no time for the niceties now, though.

Benny turned to look at me. Her sick eyes didn‟t exactly

light up at the small, vague sense of hope in my voice, but at

least I knew something behind them was paying attention.

„When I was captured by Sleed, wherever that was, he said

that his mind wasn‟t actually in the body he was using. He

also said that his dream was to remake the world to his own

liking, leaving him alone in the centre. Now, the centre of the

blast area is gonna be this building, but within it we‟re still

off to one side.‟ I gestured to the window and the contrivance

beyond it. „I‟ll bet you anything you like he‟s not up there.

That leaves only one place.‟

Benny thought about it, and laboriously forced her face

into the lines of dubiousness. „You‟re clutching at straws.

Real life doesn‟t work like that.‟

„Well, OK,‟ I said. „So we‟ve blundered into fiction. Down

into the bowels for the final confrontation with the

Mephistopheles Beast. Thing is, if I‟m wrong and he‟s not

down there, we‟re buggered anyway. So we‟ve got nothing to

lose.‟

For all I know, the ZipCo™ building may have housed a vast

underground complex packed with minions, torture

machines and monitors that show countdowns and go bing.

We didn‟t find it, though. What we did find was a likely-

looking cover plate under the carpet in the lobby, and this

time I actually broke a finger getting it off.

The maintenance shaft was just over a metre wide, fixed

with steel rungs. It would have been dark as hell down there,

but I made a small detour back to the car and returned with

a little torch I‟d unearthed from the glove compartment.

We descended, me holding on to Benny and using a little

trick I‟d learnt years before, when I was in the Oblivion

Angels, for situations such as this. You keep your back

braced if you can and simply drop, kicking your feet against

every second or third rung to control your momentum,

brushing the rungs with your fingers (in this case, unbroken

or unsprained fingers of my free hand) to compensate for any

change in rhythm. Do it right and it‟s several times faster

than climbing, and just slow enough to stop you ending up

as a greasy stain.

We descended for two whole minutes. We dropped through

areas of intense heat and passed a number of ducts that

smelt of melting steel. I assumed that these would come into

operation and seal the shaft some time before the bomb

above went off, and just hoped that they wouldn‟t start

gushing quite yet.

I became aware of the fact that we‟d reached the bottom of

the shaft by the simple expedient of trying to kick at a rung

that wasn‟t there, falling three metres through pulsing light

and landing on something hard. Benny landed on top of me,

which wouldn‟t have ordinarily been a problem, but the

genera] battering I‟d gone through over the last few days had

taken more out of me than I‟d thought. I felt a couple of ribs

go. I looked up at a pair of retracted butterfly shutters and

coughed blood for a bit.

Benny‟s weight went off me and then her exhausted face

came close to mine. „Are you all right?‟

I‟ve been asked more than a few stupid questions in my

time, but this one was right up there in the packet-of-

Garibaldi stakes. „Wheeze,‟ I said. „Wheeze, wheeze, wheeze.‟

Benny shrugged out of her too-big jacket and pulled off her

sweatshirt, which she tied around me, working with the

deliberation of someone forcing her body to move long after it

should have dropped. The stretchy firmness of the cloth

seemed to do the trick to some extent - I‟d either caught

instantaneous parapneumonia or my left lung had collapsed,

but any kind of medical attention for it was going to have to

wait.

We were in a smallish steel-walled chamber. Set into one of

the walls was a heavy-impact door that seemed to be the

living epitome of the entrance to a holomovie bunker. It even

had one of those metal wheels in the centre. I regulated my

breathing so I could move without too much pain, climbed to

my feet and spun the handle. Mechanical bolts retracted and

the door swung inward with a hiss and gust of equalizing air

pressure. A faint vibration in the floor, which I hadn‟t noticed

till my attention was called to it, became the thrum and

whine of generators.

„Can you walk?‟ Benny said to me. „Should we see?‟

„Wheeze,‟ I said.

Leaning on each other, neither of us completely sure who

was supporting the other, we went through the doorway.

I suppose that, when I‟d thought about it, the image I‟d had

of Sleed‟s brain had been based on the state of his stolen

bodies, in the Executive Boardroom on Sharabeth and here

in the Proximan Chain. I expected something cancerous and

malevolent, a black and pulsing clot of matter surrounded by

sparking, arcane galvanistics and blood pumps.

In the end, Sleed‟s brain wasn‟t even so much as nasty-

looking. It wasn‟t even organic. Under a crystal dome was a

cruciferously dendritic tree of golden, glowing filaments, the

light it cast seeming to pulse and swirl over it, producing a

scintillating and maybe even coruscating effect. As an object,

as a physical shape in the world, it was beautiful, a perfect

mechanism that seemed to hold eternity within it. My first

impulse was to step towards it, automatically, with a kind of

mindless sense of wonder.

And then my senses spun. My body shook and lurched as

what felt like electricity arced through it. And something

insinuated itself through my brain. I know the brain isn‟t

supposed to feel anything, but I know what I felt. It felt warm

and slippery and glutinous, and I apologize in advance for

any delicate sensibilities, but it felt precisely as if my brain

was being injected with semen.

Now I‟m supposed to be talking about the facts here, so let

me drop in several of them that were surmised and someway

confirmed later. It seems that Sleed was attempting to infect

me on the mental level, subsume me with a control far

greater than that when he had attempted to set me upon

Benny, and closer to the man whose body he was using then.

Sleed was, in short, attempting to pull my body and physical

brain on like a new suit.

The thing was, it didn‟t work. Since his attempt at

restructuring, my conscious mind was operating on a

different level, working through some quite unorthodox

cerebral connections and centred around areas of the brain

that your basic humans simply never use. The upshot was

that he couldn‟t get a handle on it, like opening the

instruction manual for some complicated bit of hideously

expensive equipment to find it‟s in Mandarin when you can‟t

even read Cantonese. Of course, it‟s possible, too, that he

simply rejected my body because it wasn‟t in the best of

shape, what with one thing and another.

In any event, my body jerked and shook under alien

energies - and then the contact broke, shocking me into

unconsciousness. As my last thread of awareness died,

however, out of the corner of my eye before the blackness

rushed in to engulf me, I saw that tendrils of energy were

now playing over Benny‟s body, and that it was beginning to

rise…

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield:

I‟m not in any state to... I just want to...

Concentrate, Benny. Sequence is everything, sequence is

all. One thought in front of another. Got that? Good. Carry

on...

The feeling was impossible to explain or describe, any more

than you can quantify every specific process in the way you

think of something when you‟re trying to write a book, and it

leads to something else, and something else - and before you

know it there‟s a whole cascade of thoughts and emotions

coming out of you, completely formed, that you never quite

knew were inside.

It felt like that, only these thoughts were alien and insane -

insane in the sense that they had no connection with the

sanity of humans, any mind-set that a human being could

ever fully comprehend.

I remembered jumbled images from a life that was not my

own. Of existing on what humans called the planet Dellah, a

minor being among those who owned the planet and its

people, to whom they stood in the office of gods. Of stumbling

upon an installation, built by outsiders from another world,

of finding machinery within that was capable of bending time

and space. Of attempting to manipulate this machinery - and

the explosion that had destroyed the small god‟s corporeal

body and flung its essence into the space/time void at

unimaginable speed, ultimately to strike some other

planetary body with such accumulated transdimensional

force as, in a certain sense, to shatter it.

Memories of how this entity - now, truly, an entity – had

found purchase on this world for its essence, had infiltrated

the data systems of this Sharabeth planet, a ghost in the

machine. Of how it had subsumed the systems of the Sleed

Incorporation and thence the body and brain of its head, a

man who had allowed extensive cyber-modifications of

himself in an effort to cheat what human beings knew as

death. Memories of how it had used this Sleed man to

construct a new brain, more to its liking and utilizing the

technologies that, the entity realized, would make it powerful

and immortal in a new and different way from all the others

of its kind. Memories of how it had then ordered the

Sharabeth-world itself to its liking and desires.

Memories of how it had been thwarted...

And then I felt its absolute hatred and rage. I knew that it

knew we were a threat to it, but I had never quite

comprehended the depth of that hatred - it remembered us

both, you see, myself from Dellah and the way I had stood

against the ultimate triumph of its kind, and [name defaced

on original source] from when, apparently, he had been

instrumental in destroying all its works on the planet

Sharabeth. It burnt for revenge, a desire for vengeance so

strong that it was madness even on its own terms - and the

chance to exact it, here and now, was simply too good an

opportunity to miss.

All of this I knew, as the tendrils of that mind wove through

my own. It took control of my limbs, some detached little part

that was still me watching it as it made them move, made me

lurch towards the immobile [name defaced on original source]

with the intention of jamming my hands into his guts until

they broke, and then plunging the splintered, jagged shard of

them into him over and over again...

And then the questing tendrils of the entity‟s mind hit the

tangled mass of structured protocols that were the legacy of

the Mary-Sue. They activated - flared to life - ripped through

my brain. It was as though I were watching from the outside,

watching those blazing strands expand and eat me up alive.

And then they stopped, and seemed to cohere, close in upon

themselves, become a living thing in its own right.

It seemed to be hunting for something, this living thing,

casting about itself in my head. And then it shot from me,

crackling from me like a static discharge, smashing into the

entity in the glowing artificial brain, which began to thrash

and scream, soundlessly, within - and forgot about me

entirely.

I gather that the Mary-Sue protocols, once triggered, were

set to latch on to and eradicate the dominant personality in

whatever brain they happen to inhabit - and, in that

moment, the dominant party had been the entity known as

Sleed. As for myself, I found I could move again, the essential

self flowing inside, able to take command and to affect and be

affected by the world. The entity had retreated almost entirely

into its artificial host, now, locked in desperate struggle with

something it hadn‟t expected and was trying to eat it whole. I

knew what I must do, then. I made my body move to the

glass dome and the glowing brain. There were no tools to

hand, nothing I could use as a club, and so I brought my

hands down on the dome with all my remaining strength.

Over and over again.

[Extract ends.]

For myself, I don‟t remember anything more until I found

myself in an untidy heap with Benny outside the ZipCo™

building, lying on builders‟ rubble and backed against a

disused skip. I hadn‟t noticed at the time, but there had been

five exits leading from the chamber that housed Sleed‟s brain

and, taking one other than the one we‟d come down, we had

resurfaced in a block not visible from the access route by car,

and on which the cosmetic building work had never been

finished.

When I came back to myself, I found that one of my not

particularly serviceable hands had its fingers clamped

around one of Benny‟s completely mined hands, in the sort of

grip where you make the muscles lock immobile and then

forget about it. Benny tells me that, after smashing Sleed‟s

brain, she herself went blank from shock and pain, and woke

up to find me dragging her out of the shaft and into an

unfinished lobby.

Apparently, so Benny says, I was muttering the same

words, over and over again, in a kind of desperate, semi-

conscious mantra. „It‟s not over,‟ I was saying. „It‟s not over.‟

Now, banal as it sounds, I‟m going to assume I was talking

about life in general, the fact of there being lots left of it and

that sort of thing - the alternative being that, on some deep

level, I knew that everything we had done had been

ultimately pointless, and that sometime soon the nasties are

gonna turn up again, in ways we can never expect. And that

latter, quite frankly, I can live without even thinking about.

All in all, it was a jolly convenient way of getting out of

having to describe the torturous process of going up the

shafts we‟d just come down. In point of fact, I think the

shafts were filling up with molten steel behind us by then, so

I‟m rather glad I don‟t remember anything about it.

In any case, now I was in something like a position and

condition to take stock again, I could see that neither Benny

nor I would be dancing the light fandango in the near future.

At a press, I considered, we‟d be hard put to essay a faint

limp - but there was something about the way she held

herself, something in her haggard face, that gave me an

active shock. It was like that time some months back when

she had - so we‟d thought – reversed the effects of the Mary-

Sue, and her true personality had surfaced from what had

been a senile-seeming wretch. Only now, it was back on full

force, blazing from her eyes as though someone in the

Country of the Soul had thrown a switch, and for the first

time I truly realized how beautiful she was. I don‟t mean

visually or sexually but, well, you know, as a proper person.

I‟m getting all embarrassed now.

Benny caught me looking at her, and looked back at me.

„Don‟t worry about me, it‟s gone.‟

„What, the illness or Sleed?‟ I said.

„Both, I think, and that‟s not -‟ She looked confused for a

moment, the way people get when they‟re trying to remember

something that‟s just on the top of their brain. Then her face

cleared and I saw a flash of her innate humour, which I‟d

first seen in the briefing stills of her those months before. „I

really think you can let go of my hand, now. People are going

to talk.‟

„Not a good idea,‟ I said. „I really don‟t think you can stand

to lose any more blood.‟ I started rooting around in the

pockets of my torn and filthy jacket in the hopes that, in

cleaning it out after I was captured, Sleed and his cohorts

had neglected the odd piece of string or the like. As I did so,

though, I became aware of movement in the sky, heard the

approaching whine of turbines.

It was a nasty-looking VTOL flier, skimming over the roof

line of the commercial zone and putting itself through

manoeuvres I just knew were making the preprogrammed

collision alerts scream in fright. Whoever the pilot was, he

knew his stuff - though in our current situation that was

hardly a comforting thought. The private security people

don‟t hire pilots like that, but there were other people after us

than private security clowns.

„Look, Benny,‟ I said. „Do you think you‟ll be able to run?‟

„At the present moment,‟ Benny said, „I doubt if I could

even dribble.‟

„Bollocks.‟ I did that kind of internal systems check where

you ask your body if it feels capable of picking up someone

and running away from hideous but basically human

monsters, and it responded with a cheery „sod you,

sunshine‟.

The flier grounded, throwing up a cloud of elderly cement

dust. A hatch racked back and two figures came out, one

heading towards us at a run, the other strolling nonchalantly

behind. Almost anybody or anything would have been

preferable to basically human monsters, but the sight of

them triggered in me what I can only describe as a pure and

mindless joy at the fact that I could now go limp and let other

people worry about things for a while.

„Hello, Mira,‟ I said, looking up at her concerned face, and

noting in passing that Braxiatel, while strolling nonchalantly,

had somehow managed to reach us at the precise same time.

„I think I‟ve gone and hurt myself.‟

EPILOGUE 1

The hours and days that followed seem slightly unreal now,

like I‟m looking at them through some cataract-like scab. My

body functions might be slightly more resilient than your

basic human being‟s, the brain cells able to repair themselves

without resort to the nanonetic techniques that were used to

repair what were basically holes eaten in Benny‟s head. The

fact remains, though, that I can be damaged and the damage

leaves scars. I spent a few weeks in an accelerated-healing

vat, and came out of it to find that various Sleed-instigated

contracts were still out on me for the murders of one Bernice

Surprise Summerfield and one Kara Delbane, Crimes Against

Sentience and various other minor infractions against the

various factions and powers, and one or two of them were

actually true.

Since Benny was quite obviously alive it was relatively easy

to get the first charge quashed, only slightly more difficult for

the second after something of the true facts came out. And

the rest were more or less dealt with by way of liberal

quantities of cash in certain quarters, and the fact that

GalNet suddenly started trumpeting me as the Saviour of the

Proximan Chain. This last was achieved, in part, by some

contacts I have in the media, and by way of some heavy-duty

transputer-system manipulation by Braxiatel, who has the

sort of resources in that area that make my own small efforts

with Box look sick.

Actually, I didn‟t. Save the Proximan Chain, I mean, at

least in that sense. I‟ll come to that in a minute.

Getting back to the time I spent in the healing vat, though,

I have to mention something somewhat stranger than most.

What with one thing and another, though I was unaware of it

at the time, I‟d damaged my left arm to the point where the

only real way to go was to lop it off and prep it for grafting. I

then caused quite a stir when my body started to regenerate

a new one of its own accord. They removed the preliminary

nubs of fingers at least three times, thinking they were

tumours or something, and it was only a sharp-eyed med

tech noticing what might have been the beginnings of the

roots for fingernails that stopped this process going on

indefinitely.

This is not a biological characteristic of humans, or even a

custom-built APE, and, thinking about it, I can come up with

only a couple of possible explanations. The first is that, when

the basically human creature attacked me in the transit

station, it infected me with some kind of arm-growing-back

matter

that

ultimately

remains

unidentifiable

and

unclassifiable. The second is that, for reasons I cannot even

begin to guess at, I am neither human nor APE in the

generally accepted sense, and everything I‟ve known or have

been told about myself is a lie. There‟s a healthy dose of that

kind of paranoia in me, in any case, just as there is in

everybody else, and this would take it to a whole new level -

so, on the whole, it‟s probably best not to think about it,

much.

On a personal note, I‟d forgotten to add a medical-

treatment clause into my contract with Braxiatel - and I

couldn‟t write it off as expenses, the contract having ended

with the destruction of Sleed‟s brain. I could have asked

Braxiatel or Benny for a sub, I suppose, and I like to think

that they‟d have paid without a thought - but the code by

which I live simply won‟t allow me to do that So I ended up

paying for it myself, which ate enough of my exorbitant, five-

times-base fee away to leave me stone-cold flat. Ah, well.

There are a couple of loose ends that I suppose I should tie

up. The murder of Kara, for example, was never fully solved,

at least to my satisfaction. I mean. Praetorian said he was

directly involved, and all the circumstantial evidence gives

me the feeling that it was him in the company of Sleed‟s

remote-controlled and borrowed body - but it also feels a bit

too pat, if you get what I mean, dropped in there for the

specific reason of tying up a loose end. In any case, if it was

some other actual hand that clapped itself across her mouth

and pinched her nose shut, the mind behind the hand is

dead and gone - or so we can but hope.

I never found out where, precisely, the place was that I had

been taken to when I was captured, the place where Sleed

had stored his basically human monsters. It could have been

anywhere, quite frankly, what with the way names and

addresses in the Proximan Chain tend to gravitate around. I

do know, though, that quite a number of basically human

but hideously deformed bodies have been found scattered

sporadically across the entire Chain, each having committed

suicide more or less simultaneously, and more or less around

the time that Benny was destroying Sleed‟s brain.

The various APEs and other Stratum Seven operatives who

had been hired by Braxiatel for the case have been simply

paid off, Craven and whosoever might have been working for

the other side included. We won, they lost, and the point

about people in this line of work is that afterwards all bets

are off. It‟s just one of those things that, if you don‟t get what

I mean like a shot, I‟d have to spend around fifty virtual

pages making clear, and I don‟t wanna do that, so I won‟t.

ZipCo™ is still advertising, incidentally. Part of Sleed‟s

process in setting up this phantom concern was to generate

all those various ads on a self-replicating basis capable of

ringing the changes on incredibly dodgy consumer items for

ever, and the bandwidth and airtime are booked up in

advance, and locked solid by contract, for well into the next

century. There is literally no way that these ads can be

stopped, even though the corporate entity that created them

doesn‟t exist and never really existed in the first place. Ah,

well, again.

Oh yeah, I said how I was going to talk about how I didn‟t

really save the Proximan Chain. To get to that, let me back

up a bit and run through the events more or less in order:

Chris Cwej, you‟ll recall, was left unconscious and

temporarily mind-wiped by Praetorian so‟s he could wake up,

look at all that footage of me horribly murdering Benny and

get the completely wrong idea. Things didn‟t go to plan, at

least from Praetorian‟s end, so Cwej wakes up, sees the

footage up to the point where the camera goes dead, and

instantly rushes to Benny‟s room to investigate. The lack of

obvious horrible murders and bodies leads him to the instant

conclusion that Benny, rather than being killed, has been

abducted.

The trail leads him down to the car pool, where he finds the

body of Praetorian. Now, Cwej, apparently, was once a real

cop - not one of those SecServ™ dickheads but an

Adjudicator, a member of the Church of Adjudication on

Earth, with real cop instincts. These may not have revealed

the entire truth of the matter to him in a blast of blinding

light, but at least they let him integrate all the factors and

come to the conviction that I hadn‟t kidnapped Benny for

some nefarious purpose, and may just not have to be

automatically shot on sight.

Cwej then contacts Braxiatel and Mira. Braxiatel provides

the kind of souped-up and sensor-packed flier that some

planetary governments I could name couldn‟t buy without

mortgaging the entire planet. Those sensors are capable of

latching on to and distinguishing the pattern signature of a

specific being across half the physical Chain, as easily as a

spy satellite can read a page of newsprint. They couldn‟t find

us for a while, and were starting to worry, before we

happened to come out of a mile-deep shaft and all the

sensors went ping. With the flier‟s own mini-transmat

capability, and with Cwej in the pilot seat, that was how they

found us. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to when we weren‟t

in any actual danger by the time they did, but there you go.

After they had found us, and learnt something of the story,

Cwej had contacted certain experts that he knew. I‟m a sort

of general specialist, and know how to find the odd expert in

various things myself if I need to - but Cwej knew the sort of

experts who could defuse a planet-cracker two hours after it

had exploded and put the planet back together as an

afterthought. These people went over the mutagen bomb in

the ZipCo™ central tower with a fine-tooth comb and

discovered that, as Benny and I had intimated, it was quite

capable of turning the Proximan Chain into a seven-billion

population centre of utter screaming horror - or at least it

would, if a couple of the key control systems hadn‟t been

cross-connected so that the trigger codes chased themselves

round and round in circles ad infinitum.

So, anyway, long story short. The Proximan Chain was

never in any danger from that quarter, so I didn‟t save it in

any way, shape or form. Ah, well, again. Just one of those

weeks, basically.

Benny and the others are saying that all this was the result

of Sleed‟s basic nature. Whatever he was, they say, whatever

he or it transformed into on the trip from Dellah to

Sharabeth in his disembodied state, he or it was still,

fundamentally, one of Dellah‟s gods. Those things operate on

belief with a capital B, so Benny and the others say, and it

was just that this Belief became centred upon something

different from godhood.

Sleed, they say, because it was expected of him, became a

kind of archetypical Villain in some sense - down to and

including the fatal flaw that meant he could never ultimately

win. Me, I think they‟re reading too much into it. I‟ve come to

feel that now, whatever I might have Believed at the time. The

flaws in the bomb, Kara‟s death and so much else were just

the tragic, random and ultimately meaningless cockups that

happen to us all, every single one of us, for every day in our

ultimately pointless lives. In real life.

Not that I‟m an expert on real life or anything. Whatever I

do, I can‟t escape the certain sense that things are in the end

illusory. I dream, sometimes, that I‟m still in the Think Tank,

and I sometimes wonder if that‟s the case, that I‟ve

constructed a kind of semicoherent environment as a last-

ditch defence against the dark. I keep expecting to wake up

one day, and find that reality has completely changed around

me yet again - it‟s happened before, so why shouldn‟t it

happen again? I have an idea that the mind - the generally

humanoid mind - isn‟t quite designed to cope with those

transitions, which is a bit of a shame, quite frankly, because

in one sense that‟s how the universe actually works. I get the

feeling that we‟re all of us living on our own personal

Fractured Planet, and desperately trying to pull out whatever

sense of meaning or identity we can.

* * *

And that‟s it. It‟s late now, and I‟m - not tired, exactly, just

restless. That nervy, twitchy feeling when you can‟t keep still.

I‟m suited, booted and packed, and Box is on my arm

again, minus all the expansions and expensive peripherals

that I thought might be useful but just tied it to the ground.

My flights are booked and I am, of course, for various

reasons, going to be on completely different flights. In any

case, there‟s nowhere I have to be for the next few hours, and

even then I don‟t have to be there if I don‟t want. But I can‟t

sleep and I don‟t want to be awake and there‟s nothing I need

or even want to do any more. Things‟ll look better in the

morning, of course, but the mornings never come here

without sleep, and I can‟t sleep. I think I‟ll just go out.

EPILOGUE 2

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield:

I think I need some time on my own, now, for a while. Brax is

being all solicitous and attentive in a way that suggests he‟s

learnt it from a book. Chris is running around after me like a

kicked puppy dog, and it‟s strangely at odds with that new

body and persona of his. The only person I can even stand to

be around at the moment, strangely, is Mira, purely for the

fact that she makes no bones about not bothering to be nice.

I‟m not even going to think about... well, I‟m not going to

think about him. Not yet.

The diagnostic units that are advanced enough to know say

that there‟s nary a sign of a stray Mary-Sue protocol in my

head. I‟ve been given a new lease on life, and quite possibly

the freehold. Part of me wants to jump around and dance,

while another part just sits there saying, „What the hell am I

going to do with it?‟

I‟m not quite the same, I know that much. When the

protocols went active, they took out several largish chunks of

my memory before they noticed Sleed. Whole rafts of my life

are now completely blank - the problem being, naturally, that

I don‟t know what they are, so I have no idea if they‟re really

missing or not.

Before I started writing this, I went through my stuff and

pulled out my old diaries. I‟m sitting on the bed in the hotel

and just looking at them. They make quite a pile - have I

really done so much? It doesn‟t seem possible.

I‟ve been debating with myself for an hour now, whether to

read them. What if they just contain all the usual getting-up

and brushing-of-the-teeth minutiae that I know anyway and,

if I‟ve forgotten, I can damn well live without? What if they

contain episodes of memory so wonderful that I‟ll never

capture them again, and my life will be lost in knowing how

much I‟ve lost? Wouldn‟t it just be better, in the end, to bum

the whole bloody pile and go out and start making some new

memories, rather than retread the best and the worst of a

past with which I find I now have no connection?

The lady or the tiger. What do you advise?

[Extract ends.]

Document Outline

Front Cover

Back Cover

CONTEXTUAL NOTES:

QUOTATION

BACKGROUND ZERO (SUPPLEMENTARY)

CHAPTER 1

BACKGROUND 1

CHAPTER 2

BACKGROUND 2

CHAPTER 3

BACKGROUND 3

SUPPLEMENTARY EXTRACT

BACKGROUND 4

CHAPTER 4

BACKGROUND 5

CHAPTER 5

BACKGROUND 6

CHAPTER 6

BACKGROUND 7

CHAPTER 7

BACKGROUND 8

CHAPTER 8

BACKGROUND 9

CHAPTER 9

BACKGROUND 10

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

EPILOGUE 1

EPILOGUE 2