Another three storeys down we found an abandoned maintenance shaft that Morag had discovered during her research. We used what was left of the microbes to eat their way into the abandoned shaft. We set up a winch mechanism. Rannu went first, then I followed and Mudge lowered the bagged form of Gregor down. We had no idea how long the sedative would last, though we had brought more of it with us. If he woke up en route we could all be fucked.
At the bottom of the shaft was a tunnel that led to one of the maintenance airlocks for the Mag Lev tunnels. In the tunnel we unrolled our lightweight vac suits and assembled the helmets. The Mag Lev tunnels were designed to be flexible as they were bored into tecton-ically unstable rock. They were also vacuums to limit the air resistance the high-speed train would have to push against.
Pagan hacked the airlock mechanism and sent false data to the Spoke’s systems to make it look like it hadn’t been opened. We entered the cavernous dark tunnels of the Mag Lev system. It was a twenty-mile tab via flashlight, Pagan again having to trick out cameras and sensors on his own, as Morag wouldn’t help. It was sometimes easy to forget how good Pagan was when you saw Morag’s capabilities. Spokes and the Mag Levs have some of the toughest security on Earth as they are seen as huge terrorist targets. What he did was an amazing bit of hacking, but I could see it was taking a toll on him.
In the tunnels Rannu had point. Balor was at the rear. Mudge and I were carrying Gregor; Morag and Pagan were flanking us. There were no Mag Levs. I reckoned Rolleston’s people must’ve shut them down.
I didn’t think twice about a twenty-mile tab, even post-combat. That’s why it came as something of a surprise when my helmet filled with bloody vomit, almost choking me, and I collapsed.
I found out what happened later on. They managed to evacuate the sick from my helmet into the rest of the suit. Apparently when they took it off me, back onboard the Mountain Princess, it was pretty disgusting. Embarrassingly I had to be carried the rest of the way by Balor.
When we reached an external airlock Pagan again hacked the lock and sent false information to the security systems. In the airlock our suits injected us with a stasis-inducing drug that lowered our heart and respiratory systems. Balor then attached us all by safety line and with Magantu acting as scout towed us in a line to the surface, avoiding the submersibles, cybrids and exo-armour patrols that were presumably looking for us. A heavily coded comms burst brought Buck and Gibby in the transport back to find us. Balor sent Magantu back to New York. It was going to be a long swim for the shark.
Buck and Gibby flew us back to the Mountain Princess, the ore transport ship we were using as our base of operations. Fortunately Gregor did not wake up from the sedative and they were able to secure him in the recently installed containment chamber on the ship.
The chamber was in one of the ship’s concealed smuggling holds. They were well hidden but would not stand the determined and well-equipped search of the ship that presumably Rolleston and his people would begin in the near future. How long we had depended on what resources they were prepared to throw at the problem. They also had to factor in the risk of exposure, as the people doing the searching had a chance of finding Gregor, who could be difficult to explain. They would also have to be capable of dealing with him.
24
Okay, this was different. I was in an exceptionally well-rendered pub. It was very old-fashioned. They had proper untreated wooden tables and a bar that wasn’t made out of scrap and driftwood. I was sitting at one of the tables, a whisky in front of me. I tasted it. It wasn’t quite right, but then again it never was whether it was virtual, Irish, Japanese or pre-war Sirian. There was music playing, soothing with a slightly jagged undercurrent to it. I think it was pre-FHC, but it wasn’t jazz so I didn‘t recognise it.
The icon I was wearing was quite a good naturalistic interpretation of me as a natural, unaugmented human – no prosthetics, no plugs. I wondered what colour my eyes were and then realised I couldn’t remember.
I couldn’t be sure whether or not the other person in the bar had been there since I’d opened my eyes or not. I just sort of became aware of him. He sat several tables away and he was a Laughing Boy, a Smiler. One of the nastier gangs, they started off in the reclaimed zones in London and were one of the Smoke’s less pleasant exports. They portrayed themselves as a kill-for-thrills franchise. If you wanted someone done at street level you got one of these little sadists to do it.
I’d had my run-ins with them in the past, before I’d joined up, when I’d lived in Fintry. Rumour had it that in order to join them you had to kill someone for no reason. Their members tended to be the genuinely unbalanced, the wannabe hard and the desperate for attention. I wondered which this one was.
He had on the corpse paint; he had the scar tissue at the corners of his mouth, where it had been cut up into a wider smile, the shades, the mock-crushed-velvet frockcoat, presumably with an armoured lining, the shell suit and running shoes. He looked to be in his mid-teens. He sat there playing with a long scalpel-like knife and drinking a black-coloured pint that was presumably supposed to be real Jamaican Guinness. He wasn’t staring at me, so much as studying me.
He didn’t jit in a place like this. Neither did I. These sorts of places were for people with money – wage slaves or officers on leave – but those were all real-world considerations; I was weighing them up out of habit. I was about to speak to the Smiler when the door opened and a bright-blue light poured in, silhouetting a tall slender female figure as she entered.
I held my hand up, shading my eyes, but the light went when she closed the door. The icon was tall, classically beautiful with pronounced cheekbones. She had pale-blue skin and long black hair that seemed to blow in a non-existent wind. Her dress was ankle-length and looked like it was made of some blue fibrous material with living flowers on it. Her eyes were pools of solid black. As she entered the Smiler took off his shades. His eyes were surrounded by intricate eye make-up that seemed to move of its own accord; his eyes were the same pools of black as the woman’s. Suddenly I felt like the only human in the room.
‘Morag?’ I asked the woman. This icon was different from Annis. I saw the icon sigh with irritation. That was good programming.
‘It’s Annis, or an aspect of Morag said. Of course, I’d ignored netiquette by not using her icon’s name. The Smiler just watched us.
‘What’s going on?’
‘You’re unconscious, again,’ she said neutrally.
‘Some things never change,’ the Smiler said. He had a broad Scots accent that sounded familiar. It was of course obvious when I placed it. Who else would it be?
‘Gregor?’ I asked tentatively, and beneath the make-up and the leering scar I began to make out a teenage version of my friend.
‘Hasn‘t been that long,’ Gregor said and then he smiled, making the scar utterly grotesque. So you used to be a Smiler, I thought. He‘d kept that quiet and even had the scar tissue removed before joining the Regiment.
‘What is this place?’ I asked. It was going to take me a while to formulate a response to yet another unfamiliar incarnation of my old friend.
‘It’s an intuitive program,’ Morag, sorry Annis, the new sweeter-looking Annis, began.
‘You can write intuitive programs?’ I asked. It was pretty high-level stuff. I don’t know why I was surprised.
‘With help, and besides Gregor’s neuralware or biology is very compatible with Ambassador,’ she said. I didn’t like the sound of this.