‘Go now while you still can,’ Ted managed, his voice shaky, that of a man barely controlling his temper.
‘I will fucking deal with you, you fat cunt,’ McGurk told him, and then he and his two muscle-bound minders turned and headed back towards Old Portsmouth.
Ted turned to Beth. ‘You need to go home now.’
At first Beth thought he was angry with her. Then she realised. ‘What, do you think he…?’
‘Go now!’
She turned and ran, so intent on getting back to the flat that she didn’t hear what McGurk was shouting after her.
Beth sprinted across the common, cursing herself for not getting to know the city better. Her lungs felt on fire by the time she crossed on to Osborne Road, making a car brake suddenly, heading for the centre of Southsea. She turned into Palmerston Road, the ugly concrete shopping precinct. She wasn’t sure how she was breathing. She just didn’t seem to be getting enough oxygen but she didn’t stop. Past the church, the cafes on Marmion Road and right into Victoria Road South, wishing she owned a mobile phone. She had passed a number of roads she was convinced would get her there quicker but couldn’t risk getting lost. People got out of the way of the powerfully built woman sprinting down the pavement. Beth’s chest was agony now. Nearly there. Crossing Albert Road, she ended up on the bonnet of a skidding car, providing the terrified occupants with a freeze-frame image before she slid off. On to Campbell Road. She was amazed her run hadn’t resulted in police interest.
As ever, Campbell Road was lined with parked cars. She tried looking for ones that didn’t fit. A waste of time. Gasping down air as she fumbled with the lock. She was seeing stars in front of her eyes now. Into the hall. Up the stairs. Heart sinking as she saw the door to the flat was open.
Beth looked into the lounge. Maude was curled up on the sofa looking terrified. Uday was next to her, arms around her. Even in the moment that Beth had to take it in, Uday’s look said it all. You brought this down on us.
McGurk was in the armchair playing with his cane. One of his minders stood next to him; the other was towering over Uday and Maude.
‘Now where were we? Oh yes. Trevor, give this fucking mouthy bitch a bit of a slap, will you?’
Trevor was the one standing next to McGurk. He was across the living room with surprising speed, although if she hadn’t just sprinted two miles he probably wouldn’t have connected. He caught Beth in the jaw and she hit the carpet.
Beth reached under the sofa and grabbed the bayonet from its hiding place with her left hand. As she moved, she saw the look of surprise on Maude’s face. Trevor cried out, surprise first, then pain and fear. It was an awkward left-handed stab, but she left the blade in his leg as she pulled the brass knuckles out of the pocket of her leather and hit him hard in the chin and then again with less force on the nose. Trevor’s nose broke, blood spurting down his face, but he was already on his way down to the floor.
Uday flung himself at the other piece of muscle. He might as well have thrown himself at a concrete wall. He was easily batted aside. To Beth’s amazement, Maude was trying to hit him as well. It didn’t look like much of a contact but he cried out and grabbed his eye as Uday picked himself up and grabbed the big man’s legs.
‘Come on then, you southern cunt!’ Beth screamed at McGurk. But he had a gun now. It was pointed at Uday’s head.
‘Now if we’re all through playing silly fucking buggers,’ McGurk said.
Uday was looking furious. Glaring between Beth and McGurk. Maude seemed appalled by what she had done. The minder had blood pouring out from under his eye. As Beth watched, he pulled the nail file that Maude had stabbed him with out of the wound. Beth couldn’t believe that both of them had had the courage to fight.
Trevor was moaning, one leg of his trousers dark with blood. Beth stood on his leg so he couldn’t move and tore the bayonet out. He screamed.
‘Here! Any more of your nonsense and you’ll get to see your two little friends make a very special film. Do you understand me? Now drop the shiv.’
‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ Beth asked as she dropped the bayonet.
‘Never you mind what’s wrong with me, you cheeky slag. You just do as you’re fucking told.’
‘Where’s my sister?’ Beth demanded. Maude looked up at her, shock all over her face.
‘You see the gun, yes?’ He turned to the muscle that Maude had stabbed. ‘Are you all right, Markus?’
‘Yes, Mr McGurk.’
‘Right. Well why don’t you cuff her, take her downstairs and put her in the boot of the Beamer.’
‘Yes, Mr McGurk.’
‘I can’t see that happening,’ Beth said.
‘Then I break both your arms and legs and you get to watch me rape your friends to death.’
It was too much for Maude. She broke down. Uday looked angry enough to charge a gun.
As subtly as she could, Beth dropped her knuckles back into the pocket of her leather. Markus cuffed her and then put his overcoat over the cuffs to hide them.
McGurk stood up. He looked down at Trevor with disgust and delivered a vicious kick to his wound. Trevor screamed. Then he turned to the furious Uday and sobbing Maude.
‘I can find you any time I want. You understand me.’
Beth saw Uday swallow hard, bite back what he was going to say and nod. Then the three of them left, leaving the bleeding Trevor on the carpet.
19. A Long Time After the Loss
Scab had described it as an anal tract but Vic had put that down to his partner’s natural unpleasantness. Vic preferred to think of it as walking down a massive bioluminescent artery. The translucent nature of the flesh of the floating city allowed him to see its internal workings, which looked like muscle, tissue and organs on a massive scale. He understood that felines, hairless monkeys and to a lesser extent some lizards could find this sort of thing uncomfortable, but he’d grown up in the chitinous environments of star hives which prepared him for this sort of biomechanics writ large.
They were moving along the artery/sphincter on the edge of one of the Living Cities. They did not know which one. They did not know how to differentiate or indeed if they could be differentiated.
The Living Cities were one of the most celebrated sights of the Monarchist systems and indeed Known Space, considered a triumph of bioengineering, though it was suspected that they had been built using illegal – under Church law – applications of Seeder tech.
Vic reached out to touch the flesh-like wall of the artery, running one of his upper hands down it, enjoying the sensation fed back from the tactile sensor on the mechanical appendage. Through the glowing translucent wall he could look down through the cloudless sky to the scarred grey rock of Pangea’s surface.
Tendrils hung out of the bottom of the city as it floated on massive gasbags supported by redundant AG systems. The tendrils burrowed into the surface of the ruined planet like parasitical insects. Vic knew that the tendrils would be breaking down and sucking up the very surface of the planet itself for conversion and processing as raw material. Deeper burrowing tendrils would be harnessing geothermal energy from the planet’s core. Frequent tectonic events would sever tendrils, spraying rock, heat or even lava into the sky, but the living city could always call on its massive carbon reservoirs harvested from the very matter of the planet and grow more.
Eventually Pangea would be exhausted and the Living Cities would either somehow have to move to another world or die. Other worlds were in short supply due to the limited number of systems that the Church allowed access to with their bridge technology, and the rapacious, exponential, almost viral level of expansion and colonisation of the sentient races. In other words, space was crowded, and almost every bit of it was claimed. On the other hand, even with Vic’s limited knowledge of geospatial politics, and allowing for his near-total lack of interest in the subject, he realised that breaking the Church’s monopoly could lead to the opening-up of more space to colonise.