‘I have some money saved from my disability,’ her dad said from the doorway to the living room. She had been sitting on the stairs talking to Billy on the phone.
‘This is it, Dad. This is the last time I try and help her.’
‘Just bring her back to me before I die.’
She doesn’t care! Beth wanted to scream. And you’ve always been dying, haven’t you, Dad? It’s a wonder that Mum beat you to it. The only thing Talia is interested in is using you in her ‘poor me’ stories. Instead Beth just nodded.
In her room Beth packed. Clothes, soap, toothpaste, deodorant, ratty old towel, sleeping bag, all went into the army-surplus kitbag with the Celtic knotwork patterns drawn on it with marker pen. It was not much. Beth knelt in front of her bed staring at the kitbag, trying to make a decision. Finally she reached under the bed and pulled the box out. Opening it, she laid each item on the bed carefully. Brass knuckles, not the ones she had used on Mikey, her old ones that had lived in her pocket when she was working the doors. A pickaxe handle, one end with a bike chain wrapped tightly around it. A Balisong knife, often incorrectly called a butterfly knife. Beth had confiscated it from some kid when she had been working. She had kept it because she recognised a high-quality blade when she saw one. Finally she drew her great-grandfather’s First World War bayonet out of its sheath and looked at the old blade. She had stolen it years ago because nobody else cared about it, and she had not wanted Talia to sell it. The blade needed work, but that was okay – she would take her whetstone with her.
She packed all of them. If Talia had properly done it this time, was in real trouble, then she would have need of them. She was off to try and help her sister again. She was armed. This was how she had ended up in prison.
Beth put her leather jacket on, slung the kitbag over her shoulder and headed down the stairs. She did not even say goodbye. Let him hear the door slam on another daughter, she thought.
She walked out onto wet streets surrounded by grey stone.
McGurk leaned heavily on his cane and looked at the bloody and naked girl lying on top of the rubble, dust still settling on her. He was sure she was still alive: her tits were moving.
‘Well fuck,’ he said, his strong Portsmouth accent unmistakable. He could hear sirens in the distance. ‘Put her in the motor.’
‘Boss?’ Markus asked. A house blowing up was bound to draw the attraction of the police.
McGurk turned to look at Markus, who looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. Total obedience, that’s what it’s all about, McGurk thought as Markus went to pick the girl up. Besides, it was his house and he wanted to know what had happened, and he thought that maybe she was the one Arbogast had told him about, the one he had come to see.
McGurk climbed into the back of the BMW and felt the boot slam.
‘Before the Old Bill shows up, Markus,’ he said, letting just enough impatience creep into his voice to worry the other man.
4. A Long Time After the Loss
It took a long time to convince the Black Swan’s systems that the mating with the other ship/thing was safe enough to open the airlock. The docking system was too strange, too organic. Eventually Nulty had to override the system himself.
They were not shy. One of them was waiting in the docking tube for them. He looked like an eccentric soft machine sculpt. Except the alienness seemed less forced. He – they were pretty sure it was a he despite a degree of androgyny – had pale skin with lines traced over it. Eden magnified her vision. They weren’t lines but the outline of delicate scales. His eyes were black pools, no visible iris or pupil. His neck seemed to palpate slightly and his head, utterly hairless, looked swollen. Webbed fingers with black sharp-looking nails were wrapped around a staff which looked like it was made of a material somewhere between bone and pearl. He wore a scaled robe of silver-coloured material that seemed to move of its own accord.
When he opened his mouth, they recognised the noises as words; the syntax was familiar but even so it strained their neunonics’ translation routines. Behind the strange, nominally human, man they could see a soft pearl-like luminescence. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of the sea, and they could hear the sound of water gently lapping against something. Their suit sensors showed that the atmosphere was apparently breathable. If there were any toxins the sensors couldn’t pick them up. The sensors also told them that the atmosphere was warm and damp.
‘I am Ezard,’ their translation subroutines finally came back. ‘I am the speaker. You are welcome here.’
‘First contact?’ Brett asked the others over the interface.
‘He’s human, or was once,’ Eden replied.
‘Follow me,’ Ezard said. The translation was coming faster now. He turned and walked down the tube of flesh. With a degree of trepidation, the four followed. Eldon was last. He waited until the Swan’s airlock closed behind them and then sent a neunonic command to set off the viral canister that Brett had attached to his suit. He had expected some sort of warning siren and to then be torn apart but nothing happened.
‘The environment is clean here. You can take your helmet suits off if you wish, although we will not be offended if you don’t,’ Ezard was saying when Eldon caught up.
‘It’s as much for your protection as ours,’ Brett was explaining through the translator interface with the suit. ‘We come from a culture with a great deal of nano-technology pollution.’ They walked out into an open area. ‘Seeders.’ There was awe in his voice.
Eldon looked around, struggling to cope with what he saw. He did not even notice that they had lost contact with the Swan.
It was clear that, allowing for the thickness of the hull/skin, the chamber was as wide as the craft and almost as long, though either end seemed to be packed with interconnected biomechanics that were neither quite machines nor internal organs.
The chamber – Eldon struggled not to think of it as a wet cave with ribs – reminded him of the texture of the inside of his own mouth. The suit sensors told of a warm wind blowing through. The wind seemed to blow one way and then be sucked back. There was no visible floor; it was mostly clear water. The same omnipresent pearl-like luminescence that illuminated the rest of the cavern lit the shallows. There were much darker areas that were obviously a lot deeper.
The water was broken by islands which looked like a mixture of bone and some unknown type of flesh. On the islands there were more people like Ezard. They appeared to have binary male and female sexes and only a very few of them were clothed as Ezard was.
‘I assure you it did not look like this when we started. It was far more utilitarian. We sculpted this over the many generations that we’ve lived within the Mother,’ Ezard told them.
‘Where are you from?’ Eden asked, awe in her voice.
‘Earth,’ Ezard answered.
‘You don’t happen to know where it is, do you?’ Eldon asked.
‘If it exists still it will not be as it was.’
Eden glanced at the others questioningly.
‘They could know so much,’ Brett said over the interface.
‘Yes, alive they would be of incalculable worth to the uplifted races but nothing to us,’ Eldon told him angrily.
‘Boss, Brett may be right. We can’t get away with this.’ Eden said.
‘Just shut the fuck up and think about the money. Look at them – they’re not right.’