Quinn could feel his energistic power starting to boil up. His thoughts were so hot with fury he could barely contain the power. “Gotta keep it in,” he spat through clenched teeth. One mistake now, and they’d have him. “Got to.” He pummelled his hands against his head, the shock of the craziness helping to bring himself back under control. Deep breath, and he glanced out of the cab’s window. Uptown’s layout was second nature, though he’d rarely experienced it from an elevated road before, much less a cab. They’d be taking the down ramp soon, angling in to Macmillan Station. Minutes only.
His breathing evened out, though he was still outraged. The sect, the awesome gospel he’d given his very life to, was being used as the front of some ultra-spook department. No wonder Banneth and Vientus could fix for an acolyte’s bail with the cops; they were the fucking cops. Anyone with the slightest potential for danger was sucked in by the sect. And if they couldn’t be cowed into dumb obedience and neutralized that way, then they were thrown to the cops and given an Involuntary Transportee sentence.
“That was me,” he whispered in pride. “Banneth couldn’t subdue me. Not even with all that shit she can do to bodies. Not me!” So the cops had been told about the persona-sequestrator nanonics he was bringing into the arcology. He’d always wondered who’d tipped them off, who the traitor was amongst his fellow devout. There probably had never even been any in the carton.
Banneth. Always fucking Banneth.
The taxi drew up in front of one of the hundreds of vehicle entrance bays to Macmillan Station. Quinn knew there and then that he was in the deepest shit imaginable. He climbed out of the cab and walked slowly into the main concourse.
The giant arena of corporate urban architecture was almost as empty as the streets outside. There were no arrivals. No streams of frantic passengers racing away from the tops of the escalators. Icons had evaporated from the informationals, which were hanging motionless in the air. Stalls had been folded up and abandoned by their sellrats. A few clumps of listless people stood under holoscreens, cases clutched tightly, staring up at the single red message that was repeated like a parallel mirror image everywhere you looked across the station: ALL VAC-TRAIN SERVICES TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. Even the scattering of ghosts Quinn could see were wandering aimlessly about their haunt, their expressions even more glum and bewildered than usual.
A group of cops were standing together outside a closed BurrowBurger outlet, drinking from plastic cups, talking quietly among themselves. The loud echo of his footsteps as he walked towards them stirred way too many memories inside Quinn’s skull. It was the same concourse, same dark cop uniform. Then, there had been pounding feet, heart thudding hard in his chest. Screams as people dived out of his way, shouted warnings. Alarms blaring. Brilliant lightbursts. The pain of the nervejam shot.
“Excuse me, officer; could you tell me what’s happening here? I have a connection to San Antonio in half an hour.” Quinn smiled Erhard’s twitchy smile at the cops. It must have been a good copy; most of them sneered. Finally, the failed acolyte had performed a useful service for God’s Brother.
“Check the station bulletin,” one of them said. “Christ’s sake.”
“I, a ha, I don’t have a set of neural nanonics. I qualify for the company loan scheme next year.”
“Okay . . . sir; what we have here is a vacuum breach. The tunnels were pressurizing, so the transit company had to activate the emergency seals. There’s a repair crew down there now. Should be fixed in a day or so. Nothing to worry about.”
“Thank you.” Quinn walked back to the taxis.
I can’t get out, he realized. God’s Brother! The bastards have snared me here. Unless I can get to the other arcologies, His work will remain incomplete. The Night may be held off. And that cannot be allowed. They are thwarting the Light Bringer Himself!
It was frightening, the way he’d been lulled into a false sense of security. He, of all people. Ever suspicious, ever mistrustful. And he’d fallen into their trap. Yet they must be frightened of him to go to such elaborate lengths. Whoever they were.
He stood outside a taxi for a long time, working out where he should go. In the end, there wasn’t a lot of choice. He was in Edmonton for one person. And only one person would be able to tell him who his real enemy was.
This was the part Billy-Joe didn’t like. He was holding a laser pistol in one hand, there was a heavy-calibre magnetic carbine hanging on a strap round his left shoulder, fitted with a magazine of EE-tipped projectiles, a bag full of EE demolition charges on his right shoulder, codebuster and ELINT blocks on his belt, and a slim omniview band worn like a tiara on his forehead to boost his sight. It was enough hardware to start a war. Kicking the shit out of Courtney’s punters was Billy-Joe’s usual gig. Fast, nasty, and personal. None of this commando shit, where security systems would shoot back at him if anybody in the group screwed up.
But Quinn had wanted to stir things up in Edmonton, keep the cops busy and away from uptown. So Billy-Joe was sneaking down a lightless alley at half past four in the morning with ten other acolytes from Duffy’s coven.
“This is the place,” said the possessed man who was leading them, and stopped at a blank section of the alley wall.
He gave Billy-Joe the creeps, maybe even more than Quinn. One of the five possessed which Duffy had let into the bodies of snatched civilians. They all lived at the coven headquarters, treating the acolytes like shit and lording it up: the core of what Quinn promised was to be the army of the Night. Billy-Joe wasn’t so sure about all that dark destiny stuff now, despite all he’d seen Quinn do. From where he was, it was just replacing one bunch of turds for another. The sect never changed; he always got dumped on no matter who was in charge.
The possessed rested his hands on the wall, tensing as if he was trying to push it over. He probably could, Billy-Joe acknowledged. And that was without energistic power. He was at least thirty centimetres taller than Billy-Joe, and must have weighed half as much again.
A door materialized in the wall, made of wooden planks with big black iron bolts and with a sturdy circular handle. It opened silently, letting a wedge of bright light spill out into the fetid alley. There was a long hall of machinery on the other side; bulky turbine casings half-submerged in the carbon-concrete floor. Billy-Joe was looking down on them from at least sixty metres; the door had opened onto a high metal gantry running round the inside.
“In you go,” the possessed man ordered. His bass voice rumbled along the alley, agitating the rats.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to use your power,” Billy-Joe said. “The cops know how to look for it now.”
“They can only detect those fireballs we use,” the possessed said glibly. “Listen, kid; Quinn wants you to bugger up this water station, he was real keen for you to do that. That’s why I’m here with you, so I can let you guys in quietly. Now, unless you’d like to go in by the front gate, this is the way to do it.”
Three of the sensors perched along the top of the alley wall picked up the blasй assurance, relaying it to the intrigued supervisors of North America and Western Europe. The big possessed man had been leaving a trail of glitched processors ever since the little sabotage group emerged from the coven headquarters.
The ever-vigilant AI had datavised North America as soon as the first two were confirmed. A GISD covert tactical team had been dispatched to shadow them within seconds. But the trail had been so ridiculously blatant that North America had alerted Western Europe, and kept the tactical team a block away. Both of the B7 supervisors waited to see exactly where Billy-Joe and the others were heading.