Angel Stations (6 page)

He found a service entrance he’d used a couple of times over the years when he’d needed to get lost quickly, and soon lost himself in the warren of sewers and service tunnels that honeycombed the city’s infrastructure. There were people down there, shadow-people like the ones that populated the Arcologies outside the city, surviving by whatever means they could.

He went looking for Danny, and found him in the deserted Tube station which had become a kind of home to some of London’s abandoned folk. He was standing with a small cluster of people who were struggling to pick up one of their own from where he lay on the cracked concrete. Danny turned at Elias’s footsteps, then frowned and started forward when he noticed the blood.

‘Elias, what happened to you?’

‘Don’t ask, all right? What happened to your friend there?’

Danny frowned again, then glanced back at the men carrying away the body of their dead companion. As they disappeared into the gloom of the station, Danny shrugged and shook his head. ‘Died of despair, probably. Don’t tell me if you like, Elias, but you need fixing up.’

Danny led Elias back to his hospital: a long, low, luxury-sized mobile home rescued from a scrapyard that now doubled as a clinic. Elias let the priest inject him with something that seemed to distance the pain. Somewhere between the horror of what had happened to him out there in the Asteroid Belt and his present existence, Danny had found religion. As Elias told him about the Blight, Danny stared at him in horror.

‘You should be dead,’ Danny observed eventually. ‘You shouldn’t even be alive.’

‘It doesn’t always kill,’ Elias insisted.

‘You need to tell me more about exactly what happened.’

‘I can’t.’

Danny stared at him with fierce anger and disappointment.

‘Just trust me, please,’ continued Elias. The room around him swayed for a moment, till he felt Danny’s firm grip on his upper shoulder. ‘I was just trying to do the right thing.’

‘The right thing?’ said Danny, his lips set in a thin line. ‘I wonder where I’ve heard that before. Tell me you weren’t responsible for bringing it here, into this country?’

‘I wasn’t responsible.’ Elias’s voice was now a thin wheeze. ‘I was trying to help stop it, all right? But something went wrong.’

Danny smiled humourlessly. ‘That’s the wonderful thing about people. They’re always so surprised when things don’t work out exactly the way they expect them to. I myself always expect the worst, which is why I’m still alive – you should remember that.’ He seemed lost in thought for a few moments. ‘Patching up your wound I can do, but the Blight is another matter. I can’t help you with that. No one can. But if it’s any consolation, you really should be dead.’

‘Thanks.’ Elias coughed. ‘That really makes me feel so much better.’

‘Listen to me, Elias. What they did to you and the others, they did to me too, remember that. It didn’t work with me, or almost any of the rest of us, but what you possess is priceless. What you can do is . . .’ He stopped, looked down at his hands, which were trembling. He stared at them until they became still. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d have said it was miraculous. You could have helped so many people.’

‘Not if I was dead. Trencher tried, and now he’s gone. City Authority catches me, I’ll be dead too.’

Something trilled in the background. Danny stepped away, and tapped a paper keyboard spread across a fold-down table. ‘That’s the analysis just done on your nervous system.’ Danny eyed Elias with a carefully neutral expression. ‘It’s not looking good, I’m afraid. Your body seems to be resisting the Blight, but it’s still pervading your system. Enough, I think, to constitute Slow Blight.’

Elias felt his flesh go numb.

‘You know what that is, right? It’s still in there – can’t get it out. It’s part of you now.’

Elias looked at him blankly.

‘Elias, the Blight is some kind of biological
machine
. It’s much more than just some random bug. It locks itself into your nervous system and tries to change the way your body works. Nobody knows just what it intends, but nobody ever lived long enough to find out.’

‘I’ve heard of Slow Blight. Takes about a year to kill you, right?’

‘The good news is, it’s a non-infectious form of Blight. But it eats you from the inside out, starting with the nervous system. First thing you get is the shakes. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, Elias, but you should know.’ Elias noticed Danny seemed to be having trouble meeting his eyes. ‘Don’t believe what they tell you when they say it isn’t going to spread beyond India,’ Danny continued. ‘I’ve been hearing otherwise.’

Slow Blight? Somehow he couldn’t quite take it in. What Danny hadn’t said, but Elias already knew, was that there was no cure for it.
Now there’s a time limit on everything I do
, he thought.

He would die slowly, his nervous system rotting away, dying from the inside out.

Three

Autonomous Mining Collective ‘Essex Town’
(Mars/Jupiter orbit; Asteroid Cat: No. 2152 NZ20)
Ten Years Before

Something had happened to Pachenko. Elias moved ahead, scouting out the further curve of the corridor, his combat rifle gripped ready in the hands of his armoured pressure suit. These corridors were carved from bare rock, the flickering emergency lights that illuminated them bathing the walls in a blood-red glow.

‘Pachenko,’ barked Elias over the intercom. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Elias looked around. Pachenko had been at the rear.

A howl of pain and despair came over the radio. Elias turned back, pushing past Farell and Eduardez, heading back in the direction of the military transport that had brought them to this pressurized asteroid. He found Pachenko huddled against a wall.

‘They’re going to die,’ Pachenko babbled, as Elias knelt beside him. ‘I can see it,’ he said. ‘I can see it.’

‘What can you see?’

‘Blood, and pain and bodies,’ howled Pachenko. ‘I can see them, Elias. Can’t you see them?’

‘No, but I believe you.’

Another voice came over the intercom. It was Farell. ‘Sir? Everything’s gone to shit, sir. A firefight has broken out between Company A and the miners. I can’t contact Command. What should we do?’

Be anywhere but here
, thought Elias. The miners had siphoned the atmosphere out of half the asteroid seconds after Elias and the other troop companies had boarded. Things were clearly not going the way Command wanted. Elias knew what Pachenko meant, what Pachenko was experiencing.

The mining community had carved itself into one of the scattered boulders of the Asteroid Belt. It was a kilometre-long slab of nickel and iron, positioned somewhere on the route between Earth and the Oort Angel Station, which only merited a serial number in a catalogue. The miners made their living by supplying raw materials to huge-bellied cargo ships that plied their way between the Oort Station and Earth. The nature of the Belt, its disparate communities scattered in lengthy orbits around the Sun, made any attempt at control or policing impossible. Corruption and lawlessness were the way of life here. Political expediency meant the attempt at control was made, nonetheless.

‘Pachenko, Liam, listen to me. I’m going to have to leave you here. Make your way back if you can – do you understand me?’ Pachenko nodded, his eyes still staring in horror at something Elias couldn’t see, didn’t want to see.

Pachenko was the one who’d made the scientists proud.
We’re going to make special soldiers of you boys
, they’d said, before beginning the gene-tweaking process.
You’ll heal faster, live longer
. They hadn’t mentioned any of the other stuff: being able to catch glimpses of the future, the nightmarish visions experienced. So many of the other men had gone insane within days. Scientists had then been replaced by smooth-talking men in civilian suits, reminding them of their duty, of the terms of the permissions they had signed.

Elias had more than a good idea what Pachenko was going through, and would go through, slipping slowly into insanity. Elias could only pray he himself wouldn’t end up going the same way.

Command had described the situation here to them during their briefing: a self-contained economic unit, a semi-socialistic enclave of God’s Pioneers who, it seemed, had been extorting neighbouring miner communities while themselves being in the pay of a corporation seeking a monopoly on mineral extraction rights.

Later, Elias would find out that Command had been wrong – disastrously, terribly wrong. There was no extortion. Their sources had been wrong, misinformed.

They came to a kind of crossroads, Farell and Eduardez both flanking Elias. Something drifted down from above, from out of the darkness. Elias looked up to see a young girl, perhaps seventeen or so, her young round face barely visible inside a several-times-patched pressure suit. She held a weapon. She raised it. She fired. Elias heard Eduardez yell, even as the three of them brought their weapons up simultaneously.

A girl
, thought Elias.
A little girl?
He took aim, but someone else fired first. The girl exploded.

Heat and flames filled the cavern. They fell back, taking refuge in the same corridor from which they had just emerged. ‘Oh Jesus, what was that?’ yelled Farell.

‘Explosives,’ Elias heard himself say numbly. ‘They must have packed her with explosives.’ He was now finding out what Pachenko had meant. He knew now it was going to get worse.

More miners in pressure suits came crawling out of the dark, firing as they moved. Elias and his men returned fire, their armoured suits protecting them, but there were just three of them, and scores of miners. It was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed. Elias signalled for the other two to retreat further back.

New orders came through from Command. A 3D map came up on the inside of Elias’s helmet, showing him the route to take. He signalled to Eduardez and Farell, and they moved off again, re-entering the cavern they had just retreated from, and meeting with Company B coming from the opposite direction. A Korean named Lee Huang led them. The miners had vanished into the darkness.

‘We got ’em,’ said Lee. ‘They’re retreating now, pulling back. They weren’t prepared for this kind of onslaught.’

Elias thought of saying something, like,
How do we even know they’ve done anything illegal?
But he kept his mouth shut. They moved off together, coming to what the Command map indicated was a central dormitory complex.

It was open to the vacuum.

‘
We
didn’t do this,’ said Eduardez. ‘Who did this?’

Messages flew between Command and the three companies who had boarded the asteroid. Something had gone very wrong. Company C was on its way. The miners had simply pulled back, ceased resisting.

So where were they?

As they moved into the dormitory complex, they found miners everywhere, faces slack, their twisted bodies floating in the airless vacuum.
Blood, and pain and bodies
, thought Elias. They were all dead, so Pachenko had been right, not that Elias had ever doubted him.
Blood, and pain and bodies
.

They had suicided, down to the last man, woman and child. He turned to see Lee vomiting inside his helmet.

Things became very strange after that; his memory of subsequent events grew patchy. One memory remained strong: they had attempted to rescue some of the miners. Like trying to fix something that can’t be fixed, he’d thought crazily. But one thing he remembered well, above all else. Something he would never forget.

There had been a child, her face blue with hypoxia. He had watched as the girl was cut from her pressure suit and placed on a gurney. There she had lain in the stillness of death. He stared at her, and touched her face gently, a hollow feeling deep within him, in a place where a part of him had once lived but now seemed lost forever. He wanted so badly to bring her back, to rectify all the things that had caused her to be here, in this time, this place.

Then the miracle had happened.

The miracle that had sealed the fate of anyone who had emerged, transformed, from the gene treatments.

Especially Elias.

Getting back home had been far from easy. Once the mission was over, Elias had a gut feeling they’d try and find a way to hold on to all of them forever. They were, he realized, too valuable or too dangerous to be let go. So Elias had bribed a sergeant to stow him in a deep-sleep coffin on board a cargo shuttle that took a year to wind its automated way back to Earth after a long, slow solar orbit. After that, well, losing yourself in London was easy, if you knew how, and Elias had become an expert.

The experiments had left him changed, different – and not just because of the nightmares that he knew would haunt him forever. And one day, sitting in the secluded corner of a bar, the darkness obscuring his features, he was listening to an old man telling a story he hadn’t heard in a long time, and felt a chill run down his back as the details of it flooded back to him. He distantly recalled the childhood stories, something whispered in those steel and concrete playgrounds that were the streets he’d always known from infancy. It was a story of someone blessed with a kind of second sight, the power to heal. Sometimes the Primalists came into the story – and someone who was the Messiah the Primalists had been waiting for. But always, in these stories, he’d eventually deserted the Primalists, instead of leading them into the Promised Land, wherever that was.

Studying any one particular variation of this legend, it was easy to find yourself realizing, only when it was much too late, that you’d been following the wrong path, and the truth lay elsewhere. Some variations on the story maintained he’d been a soldier serving on the re-contact missions to the colonies which were originally lost for two centuries, thanks to the Hiatus. He had, the legends further claimed, the power to bring people back to life, a power he’d gained when he met an Angel, the last of its kind. Nonetheless, there was a resonance to all these stories that Elias couldn’t have been conscious of before the events he experienced out there amongst the Rocks.