A Quantum Mythology (36 page)

He tried reading, watching films, watching documentaries, watching mind-numbing sitcoms, listening to music, but he couldn’t concentrate on anything. He had run over the dream again and again in his head. As far as he could tell, he didn’t want to kill himself or anyone else. He was, however, left with the distinct feeling that there was something out there, in the city, something that wasn’t alive, exactly, but which could still at least think.

The knock on the door made him jump. Lodup opened it with a thought. Hideo’s features were slack, his eyes lifeless and focused elsewhere.

‘Hideo?’ Lodup asked.

Hideo stepped into Lodup’s room. ‘I need someone to talk to.’

‘Er, come in,’ Lodup told the submersible jockey. He was already dreading what was about to happen. He was pretty sure it would be incredibly awkward.

Hideo stepped into the room but stayed standing. ‘Could we speak in private?’ He was looking down, not making eye contact with Lodup. The door slid shut behind him.

‘You okay, man?’ Lodup was starting to get concerned now. He saw that Siraja was trying to open a comms link. He accepted it.

‘Is everything okay?’ the AI’s voice asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Lodup answered, subvocalizing. ‘Hideo doesn’t look right.’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Hideo asked.

‘Siraja,’ Lodup told him. ‘He’s worried about you.’

Hideo sat down on the end of Lodup’s bed. Lodup moved his feet out of the way. As Hideo sat down, he moved a plastic bag he’d been carrying behind his back and put it in his lap.

‘What’s in the bag?’ Lodup asked.

‘I’ve been here for more than seventy years now, you know that? I can’t go back, how would I explain it? I’m over a hundred years old.’

‘What’s in the bag?’ Lodup asked again, nervously this time. He glanced down and saw that Hideo’s dive knife was strapped to his calf.

‘Lodup,’ Siraja said, uncharacteristically using his first name, ‘we have security personnel on the way to your location. Nod if you understand.’

‘And the thing is,’ Hideo said, ‘more than anyone else – more than Sal, certainly – you and I are alike.’

Lodup nodded as if he was agreeing, though it was really for Siraja’s benefit.

‘Just keep him talking and as calm as possible,’ the AI told him.

‘We’re like the immortals. We’re real.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lodup asked, his curiosity overwhelming the fear that he had a crazy person sitting on the end of his bed.

Hideo stared at Lodup, who resisted the urge to curl up, to get as far away from the other man as possible. There was genuine hate and anger on Hideo’s face. All of it appeared to be directed at Lodup.

‘Why did they pick you?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you think if I saw your face off and wear it, they’ll believe that I’m you?’ Lodup swallowed and stared at Hideo. The cheerful submersible pilot who had brought him down here a week ago, explained how everything worked, shown him the ropes, was gone. This was a different person. The only similarity was the skin the man wore. ‘Do you want to see what’s in the bag?’

‘Erm, I don’t think so,’ Lodup said. He was bigger, he was pretty sure he was fitter and he had a black belt in Kajukenbo. All he needed to do was send the instruction for the door to open and make it past Hideo. Lodup was also no coward, and had worked in a number of dangerous situations. On two occasions he had been fired upon: once by suspected terrorists in the Philippines, and once by Indonesian pirates. On neither occasion had he frozen up as he had now.

‘We are almost with you,’ Siraja assured him.

‘You’re talking to him, aren’t you?’ Hideo asked. He opened the bag and started taking things out of it.

‘Lodup,’ Siraja said, ‘when I tell you to, you need to curl up in the corner of the bed and make yourself as small a target as possible.’

Hideo placed a gun on the bed. A pistol – it looked like a Luger of the sort Lodup had seen in World War Two films, but wrong somehow. It was so close. He could have reached out and picked it up, but the distance between him and the gun appeared to stretch, distend, until the gun looked very far away. Next Hideo put some kind of electronic device down on the bed. It took a moment for Lodup to realise it was a heavily modified version of one of the entertainment tablets. That was followed by something hairy, and red, and wet. Lodup swallowed. He’d worked out what it was but didn’t want to admit it. All moisture disappeared from his mouth.

‘Wh-what did you do to her?’ he managed.

Hideo’s brief laugh was utterly devoid of humour. ‘Isn’t it self-evident? That’s Sal’s scalp. You took something from me, so I took something from you. That’s fair, isn’t it?’

‘What did I take from you, Hideo?’ Lodup had found a kernel of anger. He tried to nurse it, hoped it would be enough to get him through this. Hideo was playing with the tablet, tapping a series of commands on its touch screen.

‘We are coming in now,’ Siraja told him.

Lodup curled up in a ball on his bed as the room went dark. His night vision kicked in, and he could see Hideo sitting on the end of his bed. His eyes glowed, as did the tablet’s screen. He was pointing the gun at Lodup.

‘The routine was developed in the fifties. Yaroslav was making it more and more difficult for people to go thatch, total surveillance and all that. I think it was created by one of the dolphins, but a lot of folks think they had outside help. I’ve sealed the door, by the way. Oh, they’ll get through, but this will give us some privacy.’

Lodup jumped as something hit the outside of the door. It took him several attempts to speak.

‘I thought we were friends?’

Hideo was on his feet. ‘No!’ he screamed, his face apoplectic with rage. ‘I thought we were friends!’ He was brandishing the gun at Lodup, who was holding his hands up in front of him. ‘But it’s you!’ He started poking himself in the head with the index finger of his left hand. ‘You they talk to.’

‘I don’t know what you mean!’ Lodup shouted.

Hideo appeared to calm down a little. ‘You should have seen Sal at the end, Lodup. I gave her wings. Beautiful red wings, like a butterfly.’ He cocked his head as if he was examining Lodup anew. The pistol was pointed at the Lodup’s face. Hideo lowered it so it was pointing at his chest and pulled the trigger. The gun went click. Hideo stared at the gun in fury. Lodup all but evacuated his bowels. He was also staring at the gun. Then he looked up at Hideo, and Hideo looked down at him.

Lodup acted before he could think. He threw himself off the bed, tackling the smaller man around the waist, picking him up and slamming him into the wall. Hideo brought the pistol down repeatedly and painfully on Lodup’s neck and the back of his head. Somehow Lodup managed to straighten up. He dropped Hideo over his shoulder, onto his head. The submersible pilot lost his grip on the pistol and reached for the dive knife. Lodup turned around, feeling nauseous from the head hits. He saw Hideo on the floor and started trying to kick and stamp, every Kajukenbo lesson forgotten in his desperation.

Hideo cried out as a number of the kicks and stamps contacted, but he managed to tear the dive knife from its sheath. Lodup jumped onto his bed to try and get away from the sharp, impossibly hard blade as Hideo slashed at him again and again. Lodup kept trying to back away but ran out of room. The blade was so sharp that he didn’t even know he’d been cut. It was only when he felt something hot and wet that he glanced down and realised he and the bed were red.

Hideo’s lack of expertise as a knife fighter meant that none of the slashes were fatal, but Lodup was still losing a lot of blood. Thinking he was dead and panicking, Lodup threw himself at Hideo again and managed to grab the wrist of the hand with the blade in it. The two of them crashed to the ground. Lodup was stronger, heavier and desperate. Hideo was insane. They thrashed around on the floor. Hideo’s face was a mask of hatred and he was desperate to hurt Lodup. Lodup found himself underneath the other man, looking up at the diamond tip of the blade slowly being forced towards him. He didn’t even notice the glow in the periphery of his night vision, coming from the door.

The thermite cutting charge blew a large hole in the sealed door. The rectangle of hardened composite material hit the ground, its glowing edges dulling from white to orange. Yaroslav was through first.

Suddenly Hideo disappeared as Yaroslav yanked the pilot into the air and threw him into a corner. As Hideo hit the wall, the room was illuminated by the flickering light of muzzle flare from the weapon of the woman who followed Yaroslav in.

Yaroslav picked Lodup up easily and pushed him into another corner, shielding him with his wide, squat body. There were another two short bursts from the other operative’s SMG. Even suppressed, the noise of the gunfire was loud in the confined space. The first two three-round bursts in the chest had killed Hideo. The third all but decapitated him, spreading his head over the wall. The woman advanced, smoking SMG at the ready, to examine the body.

‘Clear,’ she said.

Yaroslav grabbed Lodup and half-dragged, half-carried him out of the room onto the catwalk outside. He saw more security personnel. Yaroslav deposited him on a gurney and the medical team started to look him over. Yaroslav turned and went straight back into the room.

‘He’s going into shock,’ one of the medics said. Lodup was aware of a smashing noise from within his room and the lights came back on. He was injected with something. His clothes were being cut off. They sprayed the narrow wounds with a substance that looked like shaving cream. He glanced around at the other habitat staff out on the catwalks, all of them watching the show. Their faces were devoid of expression.

Yaroslav came out of the room holding Hideo’s pistol. He ejected the round in the chamber, removed the magazine and made the weapon safe.

‘Type ninety-four Nambu, standard-issue sidearm of the Japanese Imperial Forces during World War Two,’ he said, showing it to the security operative who’d done the shooting.

‘Unreliable peace of shit,’ the woman said. Lodup couldn’t place her accent. Maybe Israeli. She looked down at him. ‘Still, you’re lucky to be alive.’

He was relieved when the sedative brought unconsciousness.

Consciousness returning wasn’t entirely welcome. The sedative had resulted in dreamless sleep but he didn’t feel rested. He was back in sick-bay with Siraja standing over him like a concerned relative.

‘How are you feeling?’ Siraja asked.

‘You’re monitoring my medical status, you probably know better than me,’ Lodup said as he pushed the covers down and checked his body. He found a number of dressings across his stomach, chest and thighs, and there were more on his arms, covering defensive wounds. He pulled one of the dressings back. The wound was now ugly red scar tissue.

Lodup climbed off the bed. He was only wearing his boxer shorts. He couldn’t face going back to the bloodstained room, though maybe it had b
een cleaned already. They were, after all, very efficient down here.

‘Perhaps you should rest before—’ Siraja started.

Lodup turned on the dragon-headed AI. ‘How long before I go crazy?’ he demanded. He knew that to anyone watching it would look as if he was shouting at nothing, but he didn’t care.

‘That doesn’t happen to everyone,’ Siraja said quietly.

‘Did he kill Sal?’ Lodup asked. Siraja simply nodded. Lodup closed his eyes, his fists clenching. They had been lovers but not in love. It had never felt close or intimate, more convenient, but he had liked her. She certainly hadn’t deserved that. He opened his eyes again, glared at Siraja and then walked past the image of the AI.

Siraja appeared in the corridor next to Lodup.

‘Where are you going?’ Siraja enquired.

Lodup didn’t answer. The grass-like carpet felt warm under his bare feet. None of the people who passed him in the corridor gave him a second glance, despite the fact that he wasn’t wearing anything other than his boxer shorts. He reached the stairwell and went up the stairs two at a time. Siraja was waiting for him at the top.

‘If you return to sick-bay, I could answer all your questions.’

Lodup made a point of walking through the dragon-headed AI’s image.

Siraja was waiting at the door to C&C.

‘Going to stop me?’ Lodup asked.

Siraja opened his mouth to answer as the door opened. Lodup walked past the AI but wasn’t surprised to find the image of Siraja waiting for him inside. Siska was standing, hands behind her back, in front of the large window overlooking the moon pool. The window was polarising, dimming the harsh white light coming from beyond it.

Lodup glanced to his left and wasn’t surprised to see Yaroslav there, too.

‘Thank you,’ Lodup said. The Russian just nodded.

‘Enact privacy protocol,’ Siska said. Lodup was pretty sure the order was given out loud for his benefit. ‘They cannot hear you now,’ Siska said to Lodup, referring to the C&C staff lying on their couches.

‘Well, I’ll just have to take your word for it, won’t I?’ Lodup said acidly.

‘Do you want Siraja present?’ Siska asked.

‘Does it make any difference what I want?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then he can stay, but I’d rather he kept quiet.’

The look of hurt on Siraja’s draconic features was practically comical.

‘Who’s in charge?’ Lodup demanded.

‘As far as you’re concerned, I am,’ Siska said.

‘And as far as you’re concerned?’

Siska’s expression hadn’t really changed but Lodup felt as if the temperature had dropped in the room. Actually, he wouldn’t put it past them to try such a theatrical move.

‘We are making a special effort with you, Mr Satakano, but that only extends so far. I don’t like you coming in here and barking at me.’

Lodup stared at her incredulously. ‘I just got fucking slashed!’ he shouted at her. Her face hardened, but she didn’t say anything. Lodup glanced over at Yaroslav, but the Russian hadn’t moved. ‘Look, you’re going to modify my memory anyway, aren’t you? So what difference does it make if you tell me?’

‘What do you wish to know?’ Siska asked coldly. Today her long braided ponytail had been arranged into a loop. It looked like a hangman’s knot to Lodup.