9781629270050-Text-for-ePub-rev (23 page)

A machine stood next to the bed. A man stood by the machine, his hands near the small
array of dials. Wires ran from the machine to two metal-tipped electrodes.

A woman stood the other side of the bed. As Joe lay back, she bent over him and smeared
some sort of gel onto his temples. The man brought the electrodes forward.

Joe’s limbs remained out of his control, but his vocal chords were suddenly released
from whatever had held them. He used them to scream as loudly as he could.

* * * * *

Bishop was sitting in his apartment cleaning his pistol when the knock came on the
door. He opened it to find Simone Furlong standing there.

“Chosen,” he said. “I thought Wallace was going with me to the airbase. We’re not
leaving till the morning.”

She stepped forward, forcing Bishop to take a step back, making a gap for her to squeeze
past him. She skipped into the living area, looking around like a child in a toy shop.

“Cool apartment,” she said.

Bishop closed the front door and returned to his seat, walking through the waft of
expensive perfume that she trailed behind her.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

“A direct man. I like that.” She whirled around to face him. “Milandra lied to you.”

“Ah. Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes.” Her voice had a faraway, dreamlike quality that Bishop was beginning to
suspect masked a sharp intellect. “I don’t yet possess the talents that she has, but
I can do things most people can’t.”

“Go on.”

“Milandra sympathises with the drones.”

“I could sense that much. So?”

Simone smiled. Bishop noticed that she had green eyes, flecked with gold. Cat’s eyes.
“So I watched closely during the Commune when she made contact with the traitor.”

“So did I,” said Bishop. “All I saw was him close his mind and protect the two drones
that were with him.”

“That’s all she wanted anyone to see. However, being the Chosen has certain advantages.
I could see what really happened. And the best part is that she had no clue I was
watching.” She tittered.

“Okay. Why are you telling me?” Bishop had sidestepped the real question of what she
had witnessed deliberately. He wasn’t the sort of man who liked to ask for what he
wanted. He preferred to take it.

Simone shrugged her slight shoulders. “I want you to catch them.”

“Them? There’s only one traitor.”

“The drones that are with him. Kill them, too.”

“You hate them that much?”

Her eyes blazed and she almost spat the words. “Yes, I fucking hate them!” She breathed
deeply for a few moments. “This is our world and they’ve taken over.”

“Not for much longer. If the Great Coming succeeds. . . .”

“And if it doesn’t? It’ll be two less to hunt down and kill later.”

Bishop considered for a moment. “Okay. The traitor is my number one priority. . . .”

“Of course.”

“ . . . but if the drones are still with him, they’re as good as dead.”

Simone smiled. “I had a feeling we’d see eye to eye. Now for what I saw. . . .”
I can show you
she sent.

Bishop shook his head. “Uh-huh.”

Simone took a step closer and placed a finger to his temple. He didn’t flinch. “Hmm
. . . what secrets do you want to keep hidden, I wonder?”

Bishop raised his hand and caught her arm by the wrist. Her eyes opened a little wider.
He brought his head forward until it was an inch or two from her face. “No secrets,”
he said. “But I ain’t letting you in.”

He released her arm and she stepped back, bringing her other hand across to rub her
wrist where he’d gripped it. Bishop half-turned away and picked up the pistol and
cleaning brush. He started to clean the barrel.

“You’re a bit of a bastard, aren’t you?” said Simone.

“Better remember it,” Bishop said, concentrating on the weapon.

There was a long pause and Bishop knew that she would now say what she had come to
say. “They’re not going south to Plymouth. During the Commune, they were still in
Wales, around ten miles north-west of Cardiff. They’re heading north. She warned Ronstadt.
Told him that someone would be coming after him.”

“If he has half a brain, he already knew,” said Bishop. “North. Okay.”

“Make sure you get them.”

“Close the door after you.”

He didn’t look up until the door had slammed behind her. Then he grinned and bent
back to his task.

A few minutes later, another knock came on the door.

Bishop’s eyes narrowed. He placed the gun back on the table and strode to the door.
He yanked it open.

“What—”

But it wasn’t the Chosen come back to salvage some injured pride.

“May I come in?” asked Diane Heidler.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he temperature dropped to almost freezing and the sky lowered as the afternoon wore
on.

“Think we might be in for more snow,” Tom remarked.

Ceri merely grunted.

They drove on, making better time, only needing to slow down occasionally to steer
a cautious path around knots of vehicles. Tom had stopped noticing the rotting corpses
that still occupied some of the cars.

Now and then, Peter would stop at these vehicles and insist that he and Tom top-up
their fuel tanks. Each time, Peter would refuse to engage in any conversation other
than to plan the immediate journey.

Late afternoon, they crossed the border into England. Tom commented on this to Ceri,
but again only received a grunt in response. The woman had withdrawn into herself
and Tom didn’t know what to do to bring her back to the surface. Not that he spent
much time worrying about it. His own thoughts had turned dark once more as he pondered
how best to force Peter to tell them what he knew. On more than one occasion, Tom’s
thoughts strayed to the boxes and bottles of pills in the suitcase in the boot.

As the temperature dipped below freezing and night fell, they left the main road and
drove down a lane to a quaint village. Peter pulled up in front of a large pub that
looked hundreds of years old. Tom parked the Jaguar behind the Range Rover and got
out, whistling to Dusty. His breath plumed and he wrapped his arms about himself.

“Bloody parky now,” he said.

“Yep,” agreed Peter. “It’s going to snow tonight. But we should be snug in here.”

Peter tried the pub door. It was locked.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll see if I can find a back entrance.”

Tom waited, stamping his feet and bending occasionally to stroke Dusty as he bounded
up to him before scampering away again, excited to be outdoors. Ceri had just decided
to leave the warmth of the Jaguar and join him when there came the sound of bolts
being withdrawn and the pub door was thrown open.

“Welcome to
The Barrel and Bell
,” Peter said with a grin.

They all went in, Tom calling Dusty to join them. Peter held a torch, which revealed
tables of dark wood and red-cushioned benches. Overlying the faint smell of yeast
was another, smoky smell that Ceri recognised before he did.

“They’ve got a fireplace,” she said.

Peter’s torch beam picked out the huge stone chimney breast and grate. Neatly stacked
alongside it was a bundle of split logs.

“I reckon,” said Peter, “that this place was closed up at the outbreak of the plague.
I had a peek behind the bar. It’s fully stocked. The beer in the pumps will have gone
off, but there’s loads of canned and bottled drinks. And a ton of crisps and snacky
shit.” He flicked the light beam towards a door at one end of the bar. “I opened that—it
leads to the living quarters. Best keep it closed. A little, er, aromatic.”

Ceri grimaced, but Tom found that the thought of spending the night beneath a rotting
corpse or two no longer filled him with distaste.

They hunted around. In the cellar, they found crates of bottles of cola, lemonade,
beer, cider, orange juice, spring water, soda water . . . Boxes of crisps, pork scratchings,
salted peanuts, roasted peanuts, cashew nuts . . . In the kitchen they found catering-sized
jars and tins of food.

Peter exclaimed with delight as he opened a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen.

“Paraffin lamps! Six of them. Trimmed and filled. They must be used to power cuts
around here cos they’re well prepared.”

Within the hour, the three people and one dog lounged on cushioned benches drawn up
before a crackling log fire, coats and boots discarded, munching on flame-toasted
hot dog sausages, crisps and pickled eggs. Dusty wolfed down a couple of sausages
and a large tin of ham, lapping water from a giant ashtray Tom found behind the bar.
Tom washed his food down with a bottle of Australian lager; he carried a few more
bottles outside and left them to chill. Peter drank a can of cola. Ceri had taken
a bottle of vodka from behind the bar and sloshed it into a glass with orange juice.

Tom watched her surreptitiously for a while in the flickering light of the paraffin
lamps. She gulped down the first few mouthfuls and coughed. Then she gulped down some
more and refilled the glass. It was her business if she wanted to get drunk, but Tom
wanted her to wait until he had tackled Peter in case he needed her support. He started
to plan what he could say to her when he realised that he wouldn’t need to say anything.
Ceri only took small and occasional sips of the second drink as though some desire
or need had been satisfied by the first.

He turned his attention instead to Peter and was just about to embark on his opening
gambit when Ceri beat him to it.

“Tell us about earlier,” she said softly. “What you showed us. Tell us.”

Peter glanced at Tom who nodded emphatically.

Peter sighed heavily and took a long slug of his drink.

“Okay,” he said. “What I showed you today was only an impression of the truth. An
amalgamation of what happened. How do they say it in the movies? A montage? Yes. A
montage.”

“I knew it,” said Tom. “It was something you made up.”

“No,” said Peter. “Part of what I showed you I did not witness, but is nevertheless
an accurate representation of what took place.” He was silent for a moment and the
only sound was the settling of logs in the fireplace. “I guess the only way I can
do this is to tell you it all from the beginning. It’s a long story, but I can make
it manageable if you let me tell it without interrupting.” He raised his eyebrows
and looked at Ceri.

“So long as you men don’t mind me smoking in here,” she said. “And we can take an
occasional pee break. I’m a good listener.”

Peter looked at Tom.

“I can ask questions when you’ve finished?” said Tom.

“One or two. But it might be quite late by then and you’ll have a lot to digest. You
might find that you’d rather keep the bulk of your questions for tomorrow. And I’d
prefer that, too.”

“Okay.”

Peter shifted his backside on the cushion, making himself more comfortable.

“Right then,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. . . .”

* * * * *

A long, long way from here—many systems away—exists a planet. It is similar in some
ways to this one: oxygen-rich atmosphere, an abundance of water, plentiful ore and
mineral resources, almost identical surface gravity, the dominant species bipedal
mammalian creatures.

The main differences between that planet and this can largely be accounted for by
the star around which that planet orbits. Billions of years older than the sun in
this solar system, that distant star has entered its early death throes. It has expanded,
puffing up like an inflating balloon, on its way to becoming what astronomers call
a red giant.

As the star expanded, so its outer edge drew closer to the planet in its orbit. The
planet was buffeted by solar winds that increased in intensity as millennia passed.
The planet’s surface became ravaged as the winds dried up oceans and rivers, destroyed
vegetation and decimated wildlife. With increasing frequency, solar flares added to
the devastation of the surface. Very gradually, over many thousands of years, it became
a barren wasteland.

The dominant species—let’s just call them ‘people’—was eventually driven underground.
That’s where the water could be found. The people had plenty of time to plan, to develop
new technologies and advance existing ones that would enable subterranean life to
flourish. Drilling and tunnelling, ventilation, pumping, glass and plastic manufacture,
waste disposal, greenhouse horticulture, hydroponics, optics, thermodynamics . . .
and many more that humans would not recognise, such as aquapology and geogenics.

It began on a small scale. Underground settlements the size of villages grew into
towns, became cities. Great civilisations that had existed on the planet’s surface
were replicated beneath it. All the grand structures—the pyramids, the palaces, the
minarets and monoliths—that had been lost were rebuilt beneath protective glass and
plastic domes. Prisms and mirrors and light tubes carried sunlight to places not illuminated
by the domes. Aquaducts carried water to places not accessible to the vast underground
lakes. Subterranean jungles were cultivated to perform the photosynthesis that was
slowly decreasing above ground.

But the people knew it was not enough. It may take many more millennia, billennia
even, but eventually their sun would explode, sloughing off its outer shell like a
snake shedding its skin. If their planet was able to withstand the blast of debris
and still support life, it would not survive the cooling process that would follow
as the star changed from a white dwarf to a dark one. Whether from the explosion of
the sun or the ensuing cooling, the people knew that their days were numbered.

They began to turn their attention from the interior of their planet outwards. They
already possessed the knowledge and materials for space travel within their solar
system, although they had only toyed with the technology, sending out the occasional
localised probe more for fun and diversion, rather than for any significant scientific
pursuit. But now they had good reason to treat space exploration as something more
than a hobby. The ultimate survival of their entire species may depend upon the ability
to seek out another planet in another solar system to which they could decamp before
their sun exploded.

They did not waste time on the other three planets in their system. Even if one of
them would support their life forms, the problem would only be relocated, not solved.
No—they needed to seek beyond their system.

Deep space travel involves distances that the human mind struggles to comprehend.
It involves crossing expanses so vast that reducing them to mathematical expression
results in numbers so ridiculously long or ludicrously factored as to become meaningless.
The only way to express such distances in vaguely comprehensible ways is to reduce
them to absurd metaphor. As an example, to travel from that planet to this at the
speed of light would be akin to taking the smallest, lightest, downy feather from
a fluffy, newly-hatched chick; place that feather in the palm of your hand on a still
summer’s day and wait for the slightest hint of a breeze to waft it gently into the
air; now imagine that feather continues to rise into the air on some unfelt updraft
and continues rising at that same barely-moving velocity; up and up and up, on and
on and on, into the atmosphere and beyond, until one day it passes the Moon; but it
continues on through the Solar System until it reaches Mars; then on, and on, until
eventually it reaches the last planet, Neptune. That journey would take the feather
many, many years. Centuries. So it is with interstellar space travel, even at the
speed of light.

The people knew that they needed to discover the secret of travelling beyond—far beyond—the
speed of light. Now the people of that distant planet are governed by the same laws
of physics that pertain here: the Theory of Relativity and so on, that forbid the
possibility of travelling faster than light. However, they are not limited by the
inhibitions inherent in the human intellect. They knew that with their combined wisdom
there was a chance that they could discover what they sought and they bent their collective
will to achieve a solution.

They failed.

Something eluded them. A vital piece of the puzzle remained hidden. And would remain
hidden still if not for a remarkable piece of good fortune.

Life within the subterranean cities went on. At the edge of one of them, near the
planet’s equator, a small team of tunnelers was working on an expansion to the storage
area of a food depot. They broke through into a vast network of caverns that nobody
had hitherto even suspected to exist. There, deep within the caverns’ dark recesses,
they made the discoveries that would change their people’s future.

The remains of an ancient, unknown civilisation. If the civilisation had been distant
ancestors of the people, no hint had been passed down in the collective memory. The
civilisation’s existence had not so much as been suspected.

Amongst the remains were found wonderful things that are not pertinent to this tale.
Many strange artefacts lay in the darkness of those caverns, untouched for millions
of years. The purpose of some of them yet remains unclear.

A series of tablets formed from a black substance caused much scratching of heads.
Upon the surfaces of the tablets, strange symbols and diagrams and other markings.
The people of that planet have no use for writing or other forms of record. It took
them many years to understand that they were looking at recordings left by that dead
civilisation. It took them many years more to begin to decipher them. The people viewed
the markings much in the same way that Victorian explorers regarded Egyptian hieroglyphs:
with awe and utter perplexity.

The first tentative translations were greeted with scorn as they were largely nonsensical.
However, enough of a hint of what the tablets contained was soon revealed to ensure
that the people pooled their resources, their intellects, to tackle the decryption.
When it was cracked and the tablets could be read in their entirety, the people rejoiced
for here was a fine gift indeed from the ancients. The secret of faster-than-light
travel, the missing link in their search, was revealed.

Not only that. The ancients had understood how to travel at speeds that made deep
space exploration practicable, but it was more than mere theoretical knowledge. Much
more. The ancients had built a craft.

The tablets contained a complete blueprint. Materials, propulsion, proportions, dimensions
. . . The last one, dimensions, caused a great deal of consternation. The craft built
by the ancients had been vast, as huge as a mountain range. The people doubted that
they had sufficient of the materials listed in the tablets to replicate the craft
on the same scale. In particular, they lacked sufficient of the ore of a radioactive
element; one that doesn’t even exist here on Earth. The ancients must have near exhausted
the reserves of ore in constructing their craft. The problem wasn’t insurmountable—the
ore most likely could be found on the other planets within the solar system—but it
would be a lengthy process. One that happily turned out not to be necessary.