After Ivanov Robson dropped them off, both girls slept well into the morning. When they finally went downstairs for breakfast, reception informed Louise there was a small package for her. It was a single dark-red rose in a white box, with a silver bow tied round. The card that came with it was signed from Andy Behoo.
“Let me see,” Gen said, bouncing on her bed in excitement.
Louise smelt the rose, which to be honest was rather a weak scent. “No,” she said, and held the card aloft. “It’s private. You can put this in water, though.”
Gen regarded the rose suspiciously, sniffing it cautiously. “Okay. But at least tell me what he says.”
“Just: thank you for last night. That’s all.” She didn’t mention the second half of the message, where he said how lovely she was, and how he’d do anything to see her again. The card was put into her new snakeskin bag, and the little pocket codelocked against small prying fingers.
Gen took one of the vases from the ancient oak dresser, and went off to the bathroom for some water. Louise datavised her net connection server and inquired if there were any messages for her. The six-hourly ritual. Pointless, as the server would automatically deliver any communiqué as soon as it received one.
There were no messages. Specifically, no messages from Tranquillity. Louise flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling as she tried to puzzle it out. She knew she’d got the message protocol right; that was part of the NAS2600 communication program. Something had to be wrong at the other end. But when she put the news hound into primary mode, there was no report of anything untoward happening to Tranquillity. Perhaps Joshua simply wasn’t there, and her messages were piling up in his net server memory.
She thought about it for a while, then composed a brief message to Ione Saldana herself. Joshua said he knew her, they’d grown up together. If anybody knew where he was, she would.
After that, she launched a quick directory search and datavised detective Brent Roi.
“Kavanagh?” he replied. “God, you mean you bought yourself a set of neural nanonics?”
“Yes, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”
“No, but I thought your planet didn’t allow you that kind of technology.”
“I’m not on Norfolk now.”
“Yeah, right. So what the hell do you want?” he asked.
“I’d like to go to Tranquillity, please. I don’t know who I have to get permission from.”
“From me, I’m your case officer. And you can’t.”
“Why not? I thought you wanted us to leave Earth. If we got to Tranquillity, you wouldn’t have to worry about us any more.”
“Frankly, I don’t worry about you now, Miss Kavanagh. You seem to be behaving yourself—at least, you haven’t tripped any of our monitor programs.”
Louise wondered if he knew about the bugs Andy had removed at Jude’s Eworld. She wasn’t going to volunteer the information. “So why can’t I go?”
“I gather you haven’t got the hang of your news hound program yet.”
“I have.”
“Really. Then you ought know that as of oh-five-seventeen hours GMT, the global vac-train network was shut down by an emergency Presidential executive decree. Every arcology is on its own. The President’s office says they want to prevent the possessed in Paris and Edmonton from sneaking into more arcologies. Myself, I think it’s a load of crap, but the President is scared of public opinion more than he is of the possessed. So like I told you before, you’re on Earth for the duration.”
“Already?” she whispered aloud. So much for Govcentral moving slowly. But Robson had been right again. “There must be a way out of London to the tower,” she datavised.
“Only the vac-trains.”
“But how long will this go on for?”
“Ask the President. He forgot to tell me.”
“I see. Well, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. You want some advice? You have finite funds, right? You might consider shunting along to a different hotel. And if this goes on for much longer, which I suspect it will, you’ll need a job.”
“A job?”
“Yeah, that’s one of those nasty little things ordinary people do, and in return they get given money by their employer.”
“There’s no need to be rude.”
“Eat it. When you apply to the local Burrow Burger as a waitress, or whatever, they’ll want your citizenship number. Refer them to me, I’ll grant you temporary immigrant status.”
“Thank you.” That much sarcasm couldn’t be carried along a datavise, but he’d know.
“Hey, if you don’t fancy that, at least you’ve got an alternative. A girl like you won’t have any trouble finding a man to look after her.”
“Detective Roi, can I ask what happened to Fletcher?”
“No, you can’t.” The link ended.
Louise looked out of the window across Green Park. Dark clouds swirled over the dome, hiding the sun. She wondered who’d sent them.
It was a forty-storey octagonal tower in the Dalston district, one of eight similar structures that made up the Parsonage Heights development. They were supposed to raise the general tone of the neighbourhood, encumbered as it was by low-cost housing, bargain centre market halls, and a benefits-reliant population. The towers were supposed to rest on a huge underground warren of factory and light manufacturing units. Above that buzzing industrial core, the first seven floors would be given over to retail outlets, followed by five floors of leisure industry premises, three more floors of professional and commercial offices, and the remaining floors taken up by residential apartments. The whole entity would be an economic heart transplant for Dalston, creating opportunity and invigorating the maze of shabby ancient streets outside with rivers of commerce and new money.
But Dalston’s underlying clay had a water-table problem which would have tripled the cost of the underground factory warren in order to prevent it from flooding, so it was downgraded to a couple of levels of storage warehousing. The local market halls cut their rock bottom prices still further, leaving half of the retail units unrented; franchise chains took over a meagre eight per cent of the designated leisure floorspace. In order to recoup their investment, Voynow Finance hurriedly converted the thirty upper floors into comfortable apartments with a reasonable view across the Westminster Dome, which market research indicated they could sell to junior and middle management executive types.
The rushed compromise worked, after a fashion. Certainly, sixty years after its construction, Parsonage Heights was home to a slightly more affluent class than Dalston’s average. There were even some reasonable shops and cafés established on the lower floors—though what activities went on in the dilapidated, damp, and crumbling warehouses hidden beneath was something the top-floor residents declined to investigate.
The local police station knew there was a Light Bringer coven down there; but for whatever reason, the chief constable had never instituted a raid. So when Banneth’s tube train pulled in at Dalston Kingsland station, the magus and a fifteen-strong bodyguard was waiting with impunity on the platform to greet her. She took one look at the blank-faced young toughs carrying their pathetic assortment of inferior weapons, and had trouble preventing a laugh.
Did you arrange this?she asked western europe.
I simply told the magus how important you are to God’s Brother. He reacted appropriately, don’t you think?
Too appropriately. This is becoming a farce.
The Dalston coven magus stepped forwards, and bowed slightly. “High Magus, it’s an honour to have you here. We have your safe house ready.”
“It better be a good one, or I’ll have you strapped down on your own altar and demonstrate how we deal with people who fail God’s Brother in Edmonton.”
The magus’s vaguely hopeful air wafted away, leaving behind a belligerent expression. “You won’t be able to fault us. Our position hasn’t been compromised.”