When darkness – the ordinary absence of daylight – settled over the open square, she was worried as her presence became more likely to attract police attention. But a night-time meeting made sense, so she forced herself to remain in place, watching.
Finally, shivers of that other darkness manifested across the road, somewhere close to one of the black lion statues.
I have to do this.
She wanted to pee, but that was impossible. She wanted her hands to stop shaking, and that was not happening either. Still she walked across the road, reached the steps – slowly, slowly in the blackout with only a hint of moon – down to the level of the square proper. The handbag clasp opened with an unexpected snap.
A palsy took over her entire body.
‘—that?’ a voice muttered.
A vague sense of two men searching the darkened square.
Over there.
The revolver felt so massive. She crouched down, placed her handbag on the flagstones, and rose with both hands trying to keep the Webley aimed.
A faint hint of nine awful notes on the air.
I’ve got you both.
But the barrel was shaking – small deflections, big trajectory changes, so forth – which meant she had to get closer. Trying to be soundless, she advanced.
‘There!’ yelled one of her targets.
‘I see—’
Then metallic whistles sounded on all sides, torch beams swung through the air, and a leather-gloved hand reached over Gavriela’s shoulder and fastened on the revolver, while her insides dissolved in the acid of fear, reality swirling around her.
‘I’ll take that, old girl. You must be freezing.’
Rupert Forrester smiled at her, his breath steaming white by torchlight. Twenty policemen or more were converging on the enemy: two strangers, who dropped their guns and put up their hands even before the command.
‘Bloody risky night to be a brass monkey,’ Rupert added. ‘So a nice hot cup of tea would be in order, don’t you think?’
FIFTEEN
MOLSIN, 2603 AD
The concept of a single amateur outguessing the authorities to apprehend a criminal, so facile, ground away at Roger’s confidence. What he had going for him was his ability to perceive some resonance – something – from Helsen; but it was nothing he could replicate for others to use, or use himself at long distance. Barbour was an entire sky-city, and he could wander it for years and still not lay eyes on any given inhabitant.
Especially if she was avoiding him.
From the authorities’ viewpoint, their target’s appearance was unknown, likewise all the markers – such as DNA traces or neural clique configurations – normally used for suspect identification. At least, if Roger had understood Tannier and Bendelhamer correctly, that was why Helsen had stolen the autodoc: to give herself a new identity, all the way down to her molecules.
Bitch.
And the man who had been with her on Fulgor – were there two of them here, looking to replicate the Fulgor Catastrophe on Molsin? Roger walked through the halls and galleries of Barbour at random, trying to notice everything while despairing of the probabilities, with not even a halfway decent strategy for searching.
What is she after?
Assume Helsen’s objective was to create a second Anomaly, or an extension of the first. (And that was an assumption: perhaps she planned to live out her days in hiding, her life’s goal accomplished.) On Fulgor, the genesis had been a rogue Luculenta attacking her peers in Skein. On Molsin, neither concept – Luculenti or Skein – applied. Perhaps Tannier’s people had some notion of a local equivalent, some route by which a nascent Anomaly might attack. They must be smart enough, and have resources whose strength he could not gauge; but they would have no reason to share their thoughts with him.
Hence the amateur, all alone.
At an eatery, while he drank daistral, he observed a teacher accompanying fifteen pupils, all young, as they worked a holodisplay above the table they had been eating at.
‘There’s our forecast,’ she said, ‘and Jacqui, can you see the numbers?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘So if you play with them, just a little, what happens?’
The forecast views changed in real time with the girl’s manipulations.
‘If we change the numbers by a small amount,’ said the teacher, ‘does the forecast change very much?’
Shakes of young heads all around the table.
They look really bright.
Clearly the teacher was going to show them another region where altering parameters by a tiny amount shifted the prediction enormously. In a sky-city in Molsin’s streaming, complex atmospheric system, its flows made visible by predominant orange clouds, this was an everyday example to introduce chaos, the first step in learning about non-linearity and complexity.
In the holo, an image of what might have been Barbour floated amid cloud-banks, while a pulse of tiny dots streamed out from its aft end.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to the teacher. ‘Are those things just markers in the display? Or are they real?’
‘Quickbug flyers,’ the teacher said. ‘Children, I think we have an offworld visitor. What do we say?’
‘Welcome to Barbour, mister,’ they chanted.
‘Would you like to talk to us,’ asked the teacher, ‘about where you—?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.’ Roger waved at the children. ‘You guys are terrific.’
He jogged out of the eatery, flushed with the probability of behaving like an idiot, but trusting himself deep down. On this level, he had been the length of the city, from the bow-end of Vertebral Longway to the rear. He had not liked the atmosphere in the aft sections.
Bad vibes.
Subliminal hints that he had failed to process consciously? Perhaps the people really had been less friendly there, the decor and underlying architecture less pleasing; or perhaps some other perceptual trace had been attenuated beyond his capacity to detect.
Tannier’s people would know about the flyers. But if Helsen could avoid security checks, she might reach another sky-city, and maybe another after that. If this privacy culture was global, the further she went, the deeper she could hide.
Two median strips offered fast-flow transport. Using the public service interfaces displayed above his tu-ring, Roger caused a vortex to form around his feet; then the vortex whirled around his ankles, and twisted him into the main laminar flow.
He sped along Vertebral Longway, sure he had missed another opportunity.
If there was security, Roger could not see it, unless it was the two scarlet-uniformed helpers who chatted with people, younger folk in particular, as they prepared to fly outside. That preparation consisted of sitting on an extruded block of orange quickglass – here in this chamber, everything bore the hue of old marmalade – while a thin bubble formed then thickened; and finally the bubble slid across the deck and into the solid hull.
Through yellow-tinted view windows, you could see the bubbles pop out into the sky, now as teardrop-shapes with stubby wings, all of orange quickglass.
‘Are they gliders?’ asked Roger.
One of the assistants frowned – clearly a blunt question was impolite – but the other answered: ‘Mostly gliders, with arterial fuel for a full-burst emergency return if the winds increase.’
Even more than on Fulgor, quickglass was filled with intricate structures and systems, threaded through the malleable substrate.
She’s out there.
There were dozens of these quickbug flyers, maybe hundreds dipping in and out of cloud banks: an entire flock trailing the city. At some point, Helsen had slipped out in a flyer to join them, perhaps from some lower level where no one would expect a quickbug to form.
He could not hear the music, not even a fragment; nor could he see darkness twisting through impossible geometric transformations; yet certainty was crystallizing.