Something Coming Through, page 35
part #1 of Something Coming Series
Tommy smiled, looked at Drury. ‘Love the attitude. Do I get to keep her, afterwards?’
‘We’ll talk about after when there’s an after.’ Drury pointed at the shaven-headed man. ‘Take me to this mound. Chloe, you come too. You can tell me if it feels right.’
He seemed calmer, almost happy. Chloe felt a small measure of relief. As long as he was happy, she thought, he wouldn’t do anything bad. And thought then that she was beginning to get a touch of Stockholm syndrome, sympathy for the people who had kidnapped her and would almost certainly kill her when they didn’t have any more use for her. She had to remember that. She had to make herself valuable. Play this out any way she could.
Out in the whip of the wind and dust, trying to keep up with Drury and the shaven-headed man as they strode across the uneven ground to the nearest mound. A narrow trench three metres deep had been dug halfway around its circumference, exposing a close-woven lattice. She felt another dizzy wash of déjà vu. Remembering the mural in the nun’s chapel. The basket-weave struts of the spire, and something indistinct crawling through or over them…
Drury was saying something about broken towers. He was shouting through his mask, shouting to be heard over the whine of the wind, telling her that the river had flooded the area many times, depositing alluvial material and burying the towers that had stood here.
‘Tommy surveyed it when we first came out,’ he said. ‘Those magnetic anomalies I showed you weren’t there then. Something somewhere has been switched on. Something is waking up.’
‘I think I can feel it,’ Chloe said, although she couldn’t. But if Drury thought she was some kind of clairvoyant or human dowsing rod, channelling alien energy patterns, she might be able to win a little wriggle room.
‘Yeah…?’ He was staring at her through the goggles of his mask.
She said, ‘When I first met Fahad, I felt as if someone else was there. This is like that, only much stronger.’
‘You mean this Ugly Chicken.’
‘Maybe.’
She was glad she was wearing the goggles and mask; she’d always been hopeless at lying.
Drury studied her, then said, ‘Come with me,’ and he was off again, striding towards the neighbouring mound.
There was another trench, with a generator standing at its edge and air hoses snaking into the maw of a low tunnel. The noise of jackhammers came out from it. Two men stood in the lee of a solitary boulder, both wearing red quilted jackets. Drury must have bought a job lot. One of the men was burly, a rifle slung at his shoulder; the other was slender and unarmed. With a jolt, Chloe realised that it was Fahad. While Drury talked to the burly man, she told Fahad how glad she was to see him, asked him how he was.
‘We found it! The black room! We found it, and he’s in there now.’
‘Ugly Chicken? What is he doing, Fahad? Is he talking to you?’
‘They took the bead from me. Rana’s bead.’ Fahad was happy and excited. Talking quickly, jiggling from foot to foot. ‘But it doesn’t matter. He isn’t in it any more. He’s in the black room. He’s inside the system. He’s fixing things so he can go home.’
‘I thought this was his home.’
Fahad looked at her, eyes dark and serious behind his dusty goggles. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘What’s he doing, Fahad? What are you doing?’
‘It will be wonderful. You’ll see.’
‘I mean, what are you doing, helping these men?’
‘As if I have a choice. As if we have a choice.’
‘Did Drury hurt you?’
‘No, no. He was very kind. He told me about McBride, my father…’ Fahad paused, then said, ‘Mr Harris. He is here too?’
‘He’s dead, Fahad. Shot and killed by one of Drury’s men.’
The words tasted like old coins on her tongue.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fahad said. ‘Truly. But I’m glad you’re here. I want you to see.’
For a moment, Chloe thought he was going to explain everything, but then he looked past her and she turned, saw Drury coming towards them. She stepped forward and hugged Fahad, said quietly, ‘Drury killed your father. If he told you any different he was lying.’
‘He said you’d say that,’ Fahad said, and disengaged himself.
Drury’s hand fell on Chloe’s shoulder. ‘You can come with me,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe to leave the two of you together.’
50. Deal
Mangala | 30 July
Cal McBride’s goons took Vic’s rifle and pistol, patted him and Adam Nevers down. One of them found the crumpled nest of gold wire in Vic’s breast pocket and handed it to McBride, who weighed it in his palm and asked Vic what it was. McBride was sitting on a slab of rock, wearing a safari jacket and a sheepskin gilet, not quite aiming his pistol at Vic and Nevers. His head was bandaged and, under the dusty lenses of his goggles, his eyes were puffy and bruised.
‘It’s a gift from a friend of Mr Nevers,’ Vic said.
‘It’s some kind of Elder Culture shit, isn’t it?’
‘You tell me. You’re the one who has an interest in the artefact business.’
‘What does it do?’
‘I’d be happy to give you a demonstration,’ Nevers said.
‘I bet you would.’
McBride joggled the wire again, then stuffed it into the breast pocket of his safari jacket. ‘You’re here because you’re chasing people who have fallen under the spell of some kind of Elder Culture eidolon. You think it’s leading them to some kind of dangerous artefact. And I’m here because I’m after Danny Drury, who snatched those people and put them to work, looking for that artefact in the site I excavated. So the thing of it is, we’re both on the same side.’
Vic said, ‘Was it Drury who gave you the bang on the head and those two shiners?’
‘He ambushed me outside that little shithole of a town, and he killed three of my people,’ McBride said. ‘He has some muscle down there with him, ex-Army types, but me and my boys have been scouting the lie of the land, and I reckon that if we join forces we can take them down. You get Drury, Mr Nevers gets the people he chased halfway across the galaxy, and I get back the company Drury stole from me while I was in jail. How does that sound?’
‘I’m not going to agree to anything while there are guns pointed at me,’ Vic said.
‘You agree to help me, the guns are put away,’ McBride said, and stood up and held out his hand. ‘Why don’t we shake on it, like gentlemen?’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Vic said. ‘Hand over your weapons and sit tight while I wake up my drone. Something’s going on down there. I want to know what it is.’
‘What’s going on, Drury is digging up something that belongs to me,’ McBride said. ‘And if we don’t stop him, he’s going to load it into his fucking speedboat and take off back to civilisation. And then what are you going to do?’
‘I can arrest him when he gets back to Petra.’
‘And what about the people who led him to this shit? The people haunted by that eidolon. You think he’s going to take them back with him?’
‘He has a point,’ Nevers said. ‘If Fahad Chauhan and the others are down there, Drury doesn’t have any incentive to keep them alive once they’ve led him to the prize.’
‘Oh, they’re down there, all right,’ McBride said. ‘Drury couldn’t find his own fucking arse without a map.’
‘And if we help you, what happens to us once you get what you want?’ Vic said.
‘I told you,’ McBride said. ‘You get to arrest Drury, and save Fahad and his friends. You get to come out of this a hero. We all do.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not? Pride? Principles? They won’t save that kid and his friends.’
‘I think you’d take the artefact and leave no witnesses,’ Vic said.
‘I admit, part of the reason I came here was for the artefact,’ McBride said. ‘But I can’t get it without your help. So I’ll settle for getting my company back, and making sure Danny Drury gets what’s coming to him.’
The two of them stared at each other, standing in the dusty wind under the sky’s frozen ghostlight.
Nevers said, ‘I’ll help you take Drury down. And as far as I’m concerned, you get to keep everything he took off you. You can even kill him, if you want. That’s none of my business. But you don’t get to keep what’s down there. Because that’s my business, and I intend to destroy it.’
‘You really think it’s powerful shit, don’t you?’
‘I know it is. And I know how to put a stop to it.’
McBride patted his breast pocket. ‘With this thing of yours.’
‘Exactly. I came here to put an end to something horribly dangerous. Something that controls and destroys everyone who tries to use it. If you help me, you’ll get Drury, and everything he took from you. Do we have a deal?’
Vic couldn’t read Nevers. Couldn’t tell if he was making a play or if he really wanted to go in with McBride.
‘What about your friend?’ McBride said.
‘You think we’re friends because we’re both police? Six hours ago I was locked up in a cell,’ Nevers said. ‘Gayle let me out only because he needed my help. And now I’m offering you that same help.’
Vic said, ‘I suppose, Mr McBride, that in addition to getting your company back, you’ll want to walk on the murder of Ellis Peters, too.’
McBride gave him a look of perfectly constructed innocence. ‘Of who?’
‘Mr Nevers’s partner. The man you killed outside the shuttle terminal.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes you do. You killed him with your ray gun. Burned his brains out.’
McBride said, ‘If I had this ray gun, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? Because I wouldn’t need your help to take Drury down. He’s the one who has it. He used it to kill your partner, Mr Nevers, and he’ll use it to kill Fahad Chauhan and the others if we don’t do something about it. So, do we have a deal?’
‘I take care of the artefact,’ Nevers said. ‘And you take care of Drury.’
‘Absolutely. Word of honour,’ McBride said, and stuck out his hand again.
Nevers stepped forward and grasped it. Golden light flared around them.
51. The Black Room
Mangala | 29–30 July
Chloe was taken back to the tent and shepherded into one of its sleeping compartments. One of Drury’s men gave her a bottle of water and a scalding container of microwaved lasagne. No point asking if he had something without meat in it. She peeled off her wet shoes and socks and ate a little of the cheese sauce and slippery pasta, discovered she didn’t have an appetite, drank all of the water.
She tried to map out how she could survive this, but her thoughts kept dissolving into pointless fantasies of escape. Slitting a hole in the tent when her captors weren’t looking. Somehow scooping up Fahad and stealing a boat and outrunning Drury on the river. And she kept seeing Henry, too. His blank look when he’d been shot. The bubble of blood rising in his mouth. His body hanging limp between the two men as they carried it off…
A man was standing over her, shaking her shoulder. She asked to use the toilet and was taken outside. The sky had darkened and the dust haze had thickened, obscuring the mounds and dimming the frozen scarves of light tangled overhead. The toilet was a plastic sentry-box exactly like the ones at music festivals. It had the same stink, too. Chloe squatted inside it and listened to the wind hoot and wail outside until the man who’d escorted her rapped on the door.
Drury and Tommy took her on a tour of the mounds. There were ten of them, and they walked all the way around each one, Drury asking her if she could feel anything while Tommy swept the air with a long boom wired into his tablet, taking readings of local distortions in the magnetic field. Chloe said that only the mound they’d tunnelled into seemed active, and hoped that Fahad hadn’t told them any different.
Fahad was sleeping, Drury said. After the tunnel had been cleared he had spent half the night inside the mound. ‘He looked like one of those fairground fakirs, trying to summon spirits. He was about as successful, too.’
‘We should have brought a crystal ball,’ Tommy said.
‘I should have brought a real fucking archaeologist,’ Drury said.
He was tired and irritable. Chloe hoped that it was because things weren’t going the way he planned.
She told him that Fahad needed time; Drury said that was what the kid had told him. ‘His spirit guide is still fine-tuning the fucking machinery, or some such shit.’
‘Let me talk to him,’ Chloe said.
‘No, I’ll let him rest. Then we’ll give it another go-around. And if that doesn’t work,’ Drury said, ‘you’d bloody well better be able to find some way of motivating him.’
He wouldn’t let her see Fahad’s black room, either. They returned to the tent, and she sat in the sleeping compartment and tried to ignore the stray glances of the men. The oppressive claustrophobia reminded her of The World’s Worst Holiday, a camping trip in Wales when her parents’ marriage had been splitting open. Soon to be followed by The World’s Worst Christmas, after her father walked out. It had rained every day, in Wales. Classic British holiday weather, as if global warming had never happened. Or perhaps because it had. Her father had sat under the awning of their tent drinking cheap red wine, or had disappeared on long solitary walks; her brother had mooned after some unobtainable girl; Chloe, aged seven, had been forced to accompany her mother on trips to local churches and chapels. While her mother sketched architectural details, she’d sit in a pew, reading, or sit in the church’s porch and watch rain fall amongst gravestones and crooked crosses. Later, she would have given anything to have those long quiet hours back, but at the time she’d been bored and fractious, disturbed by the tension between her mother and father, the change in the family’s emotional climate that she couldn’t, at the time, understand.
She dozed, jerked awake with a little shock. There were more men in the tent now, big animals crowding the common space. She recognised the bearded, eyepatched driver of the Range Rover, one of the men who’d been left behind to search for McBride.
‘There’s a problem,’ Drury told her. ‘Get your mask. I need you outside.’
‘What is it?’
‘Your friend Fahad is trying to fuck me over.’
She was hustled to the trench cut around the nearest mound. Two men were standing guard there. One told Drury there was no change in the situation; the other handed him a pair of field glasses.
Drury pushed his goggles up to his forehead and leaned at the edge of the trench, studying something through the field glasses. Then he gave them to Chloe and told her to take a look.
She had to stand on a plastic crate. The field glasses laid reticles and several small stacks of numbers over a hazy view of things moving through blowing dust. Biochines, different sizes. Some as big as cows, or cars. A jostling crowd circling the neighbouring mound.
‘They started to turn up after the kid arrived,’ Drury said. ‘One or two coming in at irregular intervals. My guys shot them. But a few hours ago a whole lot more came in out of the countryside, and they’re still coming in. And when I sent two of my men to pull the kid out of his hidey-hole, his black room, a bunch of those monsters tore them to pieces.’
Chloe remembered the mantis-thing in Hanna’s cage, purring like a contented cat. She said, ‘You think Fahad called them here?’
‘You’re the expert on the kid and his eidolon.’
‘You took him prisoner, he saw a chance to try to take control…What would you have done, in his place?’ Chloe said. She was angry and scared because she knew what was coming, could see it barrelling down the tracks towards her, massive and unstoppable.
‘The question is, what’s he doing in there?’ Drury said. ‘And why is it so fucking important to those biochines?’
Tommy said, ‘The signal is steady. But who knows if that means anything?’
Chloe said, ‘What signal?’
‘A broad-spectrum radio pulse,’ Tommy said, hefting something that looked like an antique mobile phone. A fat antenna protruded from its leather case. ‘It started up a couple of hours ago. The kid said his Ugly Chicken has woken something. If he’s done something else since then, it hasn’t changed the signal, but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t done something else. Just that we can’t detect it.’
‘Because you didn’t bring the right equipment,’ Drury said.
‘So sack me and send me home,’ Tommy said.
‘Maybe I should send you in there to get the kid,’ Drury said.
Chloe said, ‘I’ll go.’
The two men looked at her.
She said, ‘I mean, that’s what you want me to do. So I’ll do it.’
‘I want you to bring him out,’ Drury said. ‘Tell him that I won’t hurt him. Tell him that I’m not even angry with him. But also tell him that if he doesn’t come out, I’ll smash that precious bead of his to dust. And just in case you’re thinking of trying any funny stuff…’
He snapped his fingers, and one of his men handed him a fat length of dull olive tubing. Drury pulled at it and it suddenly doubled in length; he unfolded a gunsight at one end and a trigger mechanism at the other.
‘This is an M-80 rocket launcher,’ he said. ‘A one-shot handheld anti-tank weapon made in the Republic of Serbia. Fine piece of kit. We have six of them. And if you don’t bring that kid out in the next thirty minutes we’re going to fire every single one of them into that fucking tunnel.’
Chloe walked out into the dust and wind with a heavy feeling of inevitability. The feeling that everything in her life had led up to this point.
A little walkie-talkie was hooked to the collar of her jacket and plugged into her ear; she was carrying a torch and two bottles of water, a watch borrowed from one of Drury’s men, an ugly thing with a ridiculous number of little dials. Drury had told her that if the biochines attacked her, he and his men would shoot the nearest, give her a sporting chance to make a run for it. He did not need to say what would happen to her if she returned alone.
