She heard the most pleasant mechanical sound in the world, the whirr of a coffee-grinder. ‘Pour one for me,’ she called as she padded to the bathroom. Sonya’s reply was inarticulate but sounded positive.
It was an important day so she brushed her teeth. Not exactly necessary – she’d had her anti-caries shots at school like everybody else, and some people went around with filthy but perfect mouths – but a little effort didn’t hurt. She looked at herself critically as she smoothed a couple of layers of suncream over her face and hands. Bouncy auburn hair, green eyes (nature had had a little encouragement there), skin almost perfectly pale. Janis brushed a touch of pallor over the slight ruddiness of her cheeks and decided she looked great.
Sonya, her flatmate, was moving around in the kitchen like a doll with its power running down, an impression heightened by her blond curls and short blue nightdress.
‘Wanna taab?’
Janis shuddered. ‘No thanks.’
‘Zhey’re great. Wakesh you up jusht like zhat.’ She was making scrambled eggs on toast for three.
‘Gaia bless you,’ said Janis, sipping coffee. ‘How much sleep have you had?’
Sonya looked at the clock on the cooker and fell into a five-second trance of mental arithmetic.
‘Two hours. I was at one of your campus discos. It was phenomenome…fucking great. Got off with this guy.’
‘I was kind of wondering about the third portion,’ Janis said, and immediately regretted it because another glacial calculation ensued, while the toast burned. The guy in question appeared shortly afterwards: tall, black and handsome. He seemed wide awake without benefit of a tab, unobtrusively helpful to Sonya. His name was Jerome and he was from Ghana.
After breakfast Janis went into her bedroom and started throwing clothes from her wardrobe on to the bed. She selected a pleated white blouse, then hesitated with a long skirt in one hand and a pair of slate calf-length culottes in the other.
‘Sonya,’ she called, interrupting the others’ murmuring chat, ‘you using the car today?’
Sonya was. On your bike, Janis. So, culottes. She eyed the outfit. Dress to impress and all that, but it still wasn’t quite sharp enough. She sighed.
‘Sorry to bother you, Sonya,’ she said wearily. ‘Can you help me into my stays?’
‘You can breathe in now,’ Sonya said. She fastened the cord. ‘You’ll knock them out.’
‘If I don’t expire myself…Hey, what’s the matter?’
Sonya’s hand went to her mouth, came away again.
‘Oh, Janis, you’ll kill me. I totally forgot. You’re seeing some committee today, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I just remembered. Last night, at the disco. There was some fighting.’
‘At the disco?’
‘No, I mean there was an attack. On a lab somewhere. We heard shots, an explosion—’
‘Oh shit!’ Janis tightened her belt viciously, stepped into her shoes. ‘Do you know what one it—?’
Sonya shook her head. ‘I just overheard some guy later. Sitting at a table by himself, drinking and talking – about, uh, bloody cranks, I think.’
‘Oh.’ Some of Janis’s tension eased. She smiled quizzically. ‘This guy was talking to himself?’
‘Oh, no!’ Sonya sounded put out at the suggestion that she’d been eavesdropping on a loony. ‘He was talking to his gun.’
The night’s muggy heat had given way to a sharp, clear autumn morning. Janis pedalled through the streets of Uxbridge, slowly so as not to break sweat. An AWACS plane climbed low from Northolt, banked and headed west, towards Wales. The High Street looked untouched by the troubles, a cosy familiarity of supermarkets and wine bars and drug dens and viveo shops, vast mirrored frontages of office blocks behind. Around the roundabout and along the main road past the RAF barracks (DANGER: MINES), swing right into Kingston Lane. Usual early-morning traffic – a dozen buses, all different companies, milk-floats, water-floats, APCs flying the Hanoverian pennant from their aerials…
In through the security gates, scanned and frisked by sensors. The sign above the games announced:
BRUNEL UNIVERSITY AND SCIENCE PARK PLC
WARNING
FREE SPEECH ZONE
She rode along the paths, steering clear of snails making suicidal dashes for greener grass. On one lawn a foraging party of students moved slowly, stooped, looking for magic mushrooms. Some of them would be for her. Janis smiled to herself, feeling like a great lady watching her peasants. Which the students looked like, in their sweeping skirts or baggy trousers and poke bonnets or broad-brimmed hats, patiently filling baskets.
In the wall of the ground floor of the biology block a three-metre hole gaped like an exit wound.
Janis dismounted, wheeled the bike mechanically to its stand. She’d half expected this, she now realized. Her hands flipped up her lace veil and twisted it back around the crown of her hat. Up the stairs: two flights, forty steps. The corridor tiles squeaked.
The door had been crudely forced; the lock hung from splinters. A strip of black-and-yellow tape warned against entry. She backed away, shaken. The last time she’d seen a door like this it had opened on smashed terminals, empty cages, shit-daubed messages of drivelling hate.
Behind her somebody coughed. It was not a polite cough; more an uncontrollable spasm. She jumped, then turned slowly as reason caught up with reflex. A man stood leaning forward, trying to look alert but obviously tired. Tall. Thin features. Dark eyes. Skin that might have acquired its colour from genes or a sunlamp. He wore a dark grey urban-camo jumpsuit open at the throat, Docs, a helmet jammed on longish curly black hair; some kind of night-vision glasses pushed up over the front, straps dangling, phones and mike angling from its sides. He looked about thirty, quite a bit older than her, but that might just have been the light. A long, complicated firearm hung in his right hand.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘And what are you doing here?’
‘That’s just what I was about to ask you. I’m Janis Taine and this is my lab. Which it seems was broken into last night. Now—’
He raised a finger to his lips, motioned to her to back off. She was ten paces down the corridor before he stepped forward and scanned the door with the gun. His lips moved. He put his back to the wall beside the door and poked it open with the gun muzzle. A thin articulated rod shot out of the weapon and extended into the lab. After a moment it came back, and the man stepped forward, turning. He swept the tape away from the door and shook it off his hand after several attempts. He glanced at her and disappeared into the room.
‘It’s OK,’ she heard him call; then another bout of coughing.
The lab was as she’d left it. A high-rise block of cages, a terminal connected to the analyser, a bench, fume cupboard, glassware, tall fridge-freezer – which stood open. The man was standing in front of it, looking down at the stock of his gun, puzzled. He coughed, flapping his free hand in front of his mouth.
‘Air’s lousy with psychoactive volatiles,’ he said.
Janis almost pushed him aside. The test-tubes racked in the fridges were neatly lined up, labels turned to the front as if posed for a photograph. Which they might very well have been. No way had she left them like that. Each – she was certain – was a few millilitres short.
‘Oh, shit!’
Everything gets everywhere…
‘What’s the problem? The concentrations aren’t dangerous, are they?’
‘Let’s have a look. Where did you get this? No, they shouldn’t be, it’s just – well, it may have completely fucked up my experiments. The controls won’t be worth a damn now.’