He supposed he should do something. Find out who was in charge and throw some weight around. At least get them away from the hole before they dosed themselves with lethal levels of cosmic radiation, though it was probably too late. They were in there because they were hoping for survivors, trying to help people. Sometimes we seem worth saving, he thought.
Control would start putting the cover story in place. Another terrorist incident. He felt sorry for whichever community was the scapegoat this time around. There would be response teams on their way from Porton Down to seal the area. He already knew what they would find.
If Natalie wasn’t dead, then he needed to find her. He looked around the street. There were a number of CCTV cameras. Du Bois sent instructions to his phone. If the CCTVs were attached to the net in any way, he would be able to download the footage and run it through sophisticated intelligent facial-recognition software. Moments later he received a message saying that nobody fitting Natalie Luckwicke’s description had been anywhere near the club for the last week. Du Bois sighed, though he had known that it wasn’t going to be that easy.
He turned to look at the crowd. Many of them were drunk or high, clubbers evacuated from the clubs along Guildhall Walk. A lot of them were sailors, du Bois guessed. Something caught his eye – someone backing into a narrow alleyway between one of the pubs and a Chinese restaurant. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it except the figure moved furtively, suspiciously, and there was something off about it. Something about the glimpsed figure suggested that it was misshapen in some way.
Du Bois ran to the alley, drawing looks from some of the assembled police. The passage ran for about twenty feet, ending in a high fence with a gate in it. The fence was topped with broken glass. Du Bois tried the gate. It was locked. Feeling slightly absurd, he drew his pistol and kicked the gate in. It led into a small courtyard at the back of the restaurant. Some of the restaurant’s employees came out of the open back door to look at him but said nothing when they saw the gun.
Du Bois shook his head and returned to the street. Scanning the crowd again. Disconcerted. Then he found at least one face in the crowd that he recognised.
Uday and Maude had gone home. Maude hadn’t wanted to add to the chaos at the scene. They would use social networking sites to try and find out if the people they knew were okay.
Beth had circled the taped-off police perimeter trying to get the best view. She’d ended up leaning on one of the lion statues on the steps that led up to the Guildhall itself. She’d watched the blond man run into the alleyway and then reappear moments later with a gun in his hand. The man had been scanning the crowd. He stopped as he looked in her direction. Beth felt like he was staring at her, though she thought she was too far away for him to make out her features. Nevertheless she ducked behind the statue of the lion.
‘I think your sister’s been here, don’t you?’ The bag lady’s face was inches from Beth’s. Sweat, piss, stale smoke and cheap alcohol emanated from her. Beth’s face crumpled in disgust. It was the same woman she’d seen on Pretoria Street.
‘What do you mean? My sister’s d—’
The bag lady blew smoke all over her. Beth coughed, her eyes watering, and turned away. By the time the smoke had cleared, the woman was nowhere to be seen.
Beth sat down hard on the steps. It was just a weird coincidence, she told herself, the ramblings of someone with mental health problems. Her sister was dead. This had nothing to do with her. She could work hard, get on with her life and be normal. At the back of her mind, the question What if Talia is alive? just wouldn’t leave her in peace.
‘Well?’ Baron Albedo asked. Both of them had their hoods up. They liked the look and were only peripherally aware that it would draw attention to them rather than away.
‘Our journey might not be quite the waste of time that the pimp made it out to be,’ King Jeremy mused. The pair watched the response to the destruction of Weightless. It was kind of cool because it was like a disaster movie, but a bit lame because it was British, which made it look low-budget.
16. A Long Time After the Loss
The flickering black wound in Red Space at the bridge point to Pythia looked soothing to Vic. Scab had made as much of the hull transparent as he could. Vic wouldn’t have minded so much but Scab had retracted the walls to Vic’s room to make the ship as open plan as possible. Vic’s psychotic partner reclined in one of the smart chairs. The light of Red Space made his naked form look like he was covered in blood.
They said that the really damaged could talk to Red Space. Vic wondered if Scab was communing. Vic, on the other hand, had red fatigue. The constant light was making him angry. He had tried to immerse as much as possible. Experiencing his favourite colonial immersions starring his namesake Vic Matto, letting experimental soundscapes wash over him. None of it was really helping.
The bridge point to Pythia was one of the busiest points in Red Space. Ships were queueing at the bridge-point beacon, sending their bids through to transponders in Real Space for their place in the line. Coming to Pythia was always expensive.
Engines glowing, the Basilisk flew down canyons of parked ships. There were vessels from all the main corporate interests in the Consortium, each jockeying for more market position despite ultimately serving the same organisation – competition for the sake of it. Odd-looking craft from the various Monarchist systems, part works of art, part throwbacks to eras that were probably mythical anyway, and part external manifestations of decadent and broken minds. Massive military ships, brooding tonnes of armoured potential violence, moving slowly and majestically through the red, the well-armed beacons tracking their movements. It would not be the first time there had been violence at a bridge point. Then the smaller ships, private yachts of the super-rich, broken-down vessels belonging to info prospectors and gamblers looking for their big break, craft so anonymous that they screamed some intelligence agency or company, a heretical sect looking for enlightenment or whatever the opposite of enlightenment was. The poorer ships containing plenty of supplies for the months or years of waiting their turn.
And bounty ships. People like us, Vic thought. Small, fast, well armed, mostly ex-military ships. If they could afford what Pythia charged then they were good, the sort of people that the Queen’s Cartel might send after them. Even before getting in-system, the Pythia bridge point was a reasonably good place to mine data, and neither Vic nor Scab could find details of any bounty on them. Vic gave this some thought. It either meant that there wasn’t one, or it had been done carefully and contracted to professionals.
On the first day they saw some junk ship come apart under the barrage of a garish Monarchist pleasure barge. There hadn’t been any reason that Vic could see. It was probably just to relieve the boredom. The Pythia bridge-point beacons responded immediately. An AG-driven autonomous suicide drone was launched. Its AI system had it dancing around the beams of the pleasure barge’s defence systems. At the same time the beacons were broadcasting their automated admonishment of the pleasure barge publicly, along with how much property damage the suicide drone was about to do and how much it was going to cost them.
The suicide drone was destroyed as it closed but not before it fired its sub-munitions, clustered high-yield lasers, which lit up the barge’s energy displacement grid, and low-yield fusion warheads, which blossomed blue against the red. Massive reactive armour plates blew out. New matter poured like sentient tar from the chagrined pleasure barge’s carbon reservoir.