Redemption Protocol (Contact) (34 page)

“Let it happen, Violette. Don't struggle. Just relax.”

Tyburn’s face was relaxed as she choked in his grip. He leaned forward and talked to her in a gentle voice. She could feel his warm breath on her face.

“That’s good, Violette. Don't struggle now.”

Her eyes were wild as her chest heaved against her blocked windpipe. She couldn't get any air. She tried to twist her face away from him but she couldn't move; she was helpless, completely trapped. Her lungs were an inferno. Someone had to help her. Please someone help her. She was dying.

“Don't struggle, Violette. Not long now.”

Her chest was ripped apart by jagged fire. Her body jerked spasmodically and her eyesight blurred. Blobs and shapes appeared across her vision. Tyburn's face distorted as her eyesight deteriorated.

“Relax, Violette.”

She felt light headed. She prayed for rescue. Someone. Anyone. She didn't want to die.

“Good girl.”

Her senses faded. Tyburn looked down at her. Her bloodshot eyes speckled her vision like rain on a camera lens.

 56. 

Havoc went back to the medical lab to see Chaucer. He wanted to stretch his legs and consider if his assignation with Stephanie was a good thing or a bad thing. As if he didn’t know already.

He pulled up the ladder and put his head round the door. Chaucer turned away from him, apparently startled, and called out to the wall.

“Out please, love, give me a minute.”

Havoc frowned, confused.

“What are you doing?”

Chaucer fidgeted as he faced the wall.

“Just give me a minute, love. Outside please.”

Reality dawned on Havoc. He took three quick steps, grabbed hold of Chaucer and spun him around. Chaucer stood with a syringe half-emptied into a feed in his arm.

Havoc snarled.

“You bastard.”

Chaucer’s voice was tremulous.

“I didn’t take it all.”

Havoc felt incredulous.

“You’re taking Brennen’s hytelline?”

Chaucer repeated himself, slurring now that his shot was taking effect.

“I didn’t take it all.”

Beside them, Brennen moaned in pain as he lay in the medstation. Chaucer looked between them, clearly terrified. Havoc dropped Chaucer's arm. His expression threatened violence.

“Give Brennen his drugs. Now.”

Chaucer fumbled around in the cabinet as he prepared a shot of hytelline for Brennen. Brennen’s reaction was near instantaneous as Chaucer infused the shot – his moaning softened then faded away.

Havoc turned back to Chaucer, snarling.

“I ought to fucking kill you for that.”

Chaucer swallowed.

“I’m sorry.”

Havoc stabbed a finger at Brennen as he leaned over Chaucer.

“You’re not fucking with him now, you’re fucking with me. You’re going to do exactly what I tell you.”

“Alright,” Chaucer answered, his voice small.

Havoc thought he would have to make a strong impression to compete with a super-opiate like hytelline.

“If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you, Chaucer, you understand?”

Chaucer nodded.

“Yes.”

Havoc shook his head, feeling disappointment and disbelief.

“Brennen gets his dose, his full allowed dose. If you choose to run down the reserves it's up to you. But don’t game your fix out of Brennen's dose. Damn it, Chaucer, he was trying to save us all.”

Chaucer slumped back into his seat. He started crying.

“I’m sorry.”

“Ok.”

Chaucer let out great racking sobs.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so scared.”

“Ok.”

Havoc patted Chaucer on the shoulder. He couldn't believe it. He was comforting the bastard who’d stolen pain relieving drugs from Brennen – the man who’d pretty much died for him – deliberately leaving Brennen in agony in the process. And Chaucer was his
doctor
.

Havoc looked down with bemusement as Chaucer circled his arms around his waist, hugging him as he sobbed violently.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” Chaucer mumbled, over and over.

Havoc stood, Chaucer's arms around his waist, shaking his head.

 57. 

Tyburn held Hwan's neck for another minute, sensing her vitals through his fingers. Hwan was dead.

He glanced at Ekker, who looked flushed and excited. He knew that Ekker probably would have raped Hwan if he hadn't been here – the animal had done it before. But Ekker had proved his worth in countless other ways.

Tyburn nodded to the other side of the hangar as he pushed the corpse onto Ekker.

“Flush it out of the lock, gate seven, on a timer.”

A voice spoke from the shadows.

“It?”

Tyburn shook his head at the returning Darkwood.

“You just don't have the stomach for this, do you, Darkwood?”

Darkwood looked dismayed as he watched Ekker dragging the body away.

“I suppose not.”

“You need three things to fight a war, Darkwood.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Money, money and more money. That's why people like me need people like you.”

Darkwood glanced disapprovingly at Hwan’s corpse.

“This doesn't look like war to me.”

“War is fought in brutal inches, Darkwood. She died for a cause.”

“Your cause.”

“I can't think of a better one.”

“What were you doing in here?”

“Preparing, that's all.”

“She said you––”

“She'd dead, Darkwood. Let's not forget that.”

“What about this saboteur?”

“It's battle, Darkwood. We can't expect our enemies to just sit there.”

Darkwood glanced at Tyburn. For a moment, Tyburn imagined a flicker of resistance. Darkwood sighed.

“No, we can't. Do you have any idea who the agent is?”

“Not yet.”

Darkwood walked back toward the main hangar exit.

“Very well. Let's talk about the surface deployment.”

Tyburn escorted Darkwood to the exit.

A couple of minutes later, Ekker walked back to join them. Darkwood looked distastefully at Ekker as he strode away.

“I need to go.”

Tyburn watched Ekker as he approached.

“We good?”

“Yeah.”

Tyburn raised an eyebrow. Ekker sharpened up.

“Yes, Sir.”

Tyburn nodded. He switched to cast as they watched Darkwood leave.

> Darkwood suspects.

> The ORC?

> No, but something. He saw the scanner.

> He'll do what you tell him.

> He hasn't got the nerve to do differently. Industrialists are all the same.

> And if he's not?

Tyburn looked ambivalent.

> Well if you're not with us, Ekker...

Ekker’s eyes brightened and he grinned like a hyena.

 58. 

Weaver saw Darkwood re-enter the room as they completed their fourth hour of intense development. It was going well; extremely well, all things considered. The Plash ideograms and formalisms were logically organized – the representations of complex concepts frequently fused the symbols of simpler concepts, which gave them an edge in interpreting both the ideograms and their interrelationships. They had identified and translated a considerable set of physics equations and the Plash version of the periodic table. As a result, Touvenay had been able to identify symbols for concepts such as ‘force’ and ‘velocity’ that had unlocked fragments of language elsewhere.

Darkwood shook his head, bemused, as he inspected one of the screens.

“A whole tower of puzzles.”

Weaver smiled. Darkwood had been drawn to the tower image that they’d all been playing with. She wandered over and studied the image alongside him as the others drifted round.

The ‘Puzzle Tower’ displayed row after row of sequences. On each row were a series of cells, each containing a transformation of the preceding cells according to an implicit governing relationship. Toward the end of each row, blank cells were interspersed into the sequence – hence the puzzle. The first few rows were limited to strictly numerical sequences and simple to solve. The following rows were increasingly difficult and then, as the rows progressed downward, the elements of the sequences became equations and the transformations required to solve the sequences grew extraordinarily complex. Incredibly, the rows of sequences carried on all the way down to the base of the tower, twelve hundred meters below.

Weaver smiled.

“There are thousands of lines; we can get down almost a hundred.”

Kemensky shook his head.

“I don’t see the point.”

Fournier glanced sideways at Kemensky. His tone was playful.

“I suppose that tells us who is stuck on line seventy.”

Kemensky's face lit up.

“Ahh.”

Weaver smiled.

“Seventy one.”

Touvenay’s eyes narrowed. He pointed at a pillar set into the wall of the puzzle tower that ran its full height.

“Are those symbols on the column part of the sequences?”

Weaver shook her head.

“Not that we can see. We think they might be signifiers of some kind – designations of difficulty, if you will.”

Touvenay walked over and pointed at the map screen by the Colosseum.

“Look at this.”

Weaver moved after Touvenay, her curiosity piqued. She studied where Touvenay was pointing.

“Ahh.”

In various places, including the location where Touvenay proposed that there was a vault under the Colosseum, there were symbols identical to those on the puzzle tower’s signifier column.

Weaver tapped one of the symbols on the map.

“So the symbols denote puzzles, perhaps access puzzles? And the symbol from the signifier column indicates their difficulty?”

Kemensky nodded as he looked back and forth.

“Access levels...”

Touvenay peered at the symbol.

“So this vault under the Colosseum has an access difficulty equivalent to... the eightieth row of the puzzle tower?”

Weaver nodded excitedly as she noted the correspondence.

“Oh yes!”

There was delighted laughter at this apparent breakthrough. Weaver tried to imagine what it would mean in practice.

“I wonder what that will mean if we go there?”

Fournier pointed to an ideogram adjacent to the symbol denoting the access puzzle signifier.

“That's the question, and let's not ignore the accompanying power level.”

Darkwood looked interested.

“The what?”

Weaver frowned at the additional piece of information in the ideogram.

“The puzzle signifier isn’t the only piece of information in each ideogram; it’s accompanied by a scalar value whose symbology corresponds strongly with some of the energy and power representations we’ve found.”

Darkwood leaned forward.

“Is it the power of what’s inside?”

Weaver ran her tongue along her lip as she thought about it.

““I don’t think so. It appears to be associated more with the puzzle than anything else.”

Darkwood looked confused.

“The access puzzle has a difficulty and a power?”

Weaver shrugged.

“We don’t know.”

Touvenay wrinkled his nose.

“Remember that our mappings may be entirely spurious, and by virtue of where we are in the process will certainly have significant errors.”

Darkwood nodded. He stepped back, his face filling with awe as he drank in the images of the towers.

“Do any of you wonder why this is here? Why they would do this?”

A smile played across Weaver’s lips.

“I think I know.”

Darkwood’s eyes sparkled.

“Do you think they were expecting visitors?”

“You think they wanted to make it easy for us?” Kemensky said.

Weaver shook her head.

“No.”

“Go on,” Touvenay said.

Weaver struggled to suppress a grin.

“I think...” She paused for a moment, checking her assumptions. “I think it’s a school.”