Chasing the Dragon (20 page)

When he'd seen Lila standing there at the water's edge with her
face caved in, actually being remade right in front of his eyes by the
relentless recovery of the machine, he'd wondered what she'd become
and had no answer. So close to her the power of the scribbled message
had been almost enough to burn through his hand. It wanted to crawl
into his bones and scour him in its search for Max; it was as bright as
the noon sun and he'd fought to hide and dim and silence it ever since.
Max Black, Maxine, Maxamillion, had died sixteen years before and
passed over within days. She was so far beyond the physical planes that
he doubted there was anything coherent left of her in any level, but
now he doubted that doubt and knew one way or another he was going
to find out all about ghosts and the deepest parts of the dead zones
because he had been slow to find this message, and slow to anchor it
back to its caller, and ineffective and slow in trying to silence her. Perhaps he ought to have shown her his true face and not pretended, told
her the truth instead of dishing out a warning like some fevered zealot,
but she would have asked him questions, perhaps tried to cross, left the
way open like an increasing rent in reality so big he'd never have been
able to shut it down....

He pulled and undid the words, making them a straight thread.
The power of their vibration ceased. Exhausted, he gripped the lines
tightly, and slept.

he gun went off perfectly. The bullet matched the armory handbook's guidelines and made its way across the room at a little over
two thousand two hundred metres per second. Given that the average
human nerve pulse travelled at twenty-seven metres per second, this
wouldn't have left a normal Lila any time to blink let alone take a
countermeasure in the event that the dress failed to protect her. As it
was the neural propagation speed inside her Signal-revised body was
0.88c, and her reaction time within the abominable confines of her
own material limit and the atmospheric conditions was 0.35c, which
gave her a lengthily comfortable window in which to watch the dress
throw a complete tantrum.

The magic that animated it operated at as close to c as Lila could
calculate, changes taking place almost instantaneously as it made its
decisions, with a total transformation of silk jacquard to carbon nanotube cordage propagating across the entire faery in a little over two
millionths of a second. By contrast the dampener took so long to align
itself in frequency that she was coated head to foot in ultralight diamond armour before it managed to disrupt the second process, in
which the carbon tubes zipped full of a massive, yet perfectly contained
electrical charge of a magnitude Lila couldn't grab because it was off the scale. As the dampener activated the potential of the charge
dropped and then vanished. The dress paused for a breathless billionth
of a second in disbelief and then ramped up another huge shot on a different amplitude.

Then began the long, slow, boring fistfight in which the charge
powered up and the dampener cut in. Biff, bang, smash, paff, take
that, and that....

A few thousand oscillations later, the bullet lazily twirling across
the centre of the room like an idle silver hornet, the dress quit and
brooded for a full thousandth of a second. Its gloom and anger were
dark and terrible things, but there was also a kind of happy joy at
finding something difficult and dangerous to fiddle with. If it had had
a mouth it would have been cackling, and if it had had hands it would
have been rubbing them together, there was no doubt in Lila's mind
about that.

Tricky! said a little voice that was no voice in the air all around her.
Tricky tricky tricky!

The dampener flummed on, spreading invisible wet blankets, and
the voice went silent. Briefly the lights flickered, drenching them in an
aeon of darkness; then the dampener paused and after an age of battle
with recalcitrant ions light returned to shine on the silver slug as it
reached the black fibre suiting, as smoothly glossy and twisted as a
samurai's waxed braid over the centre of Lila's chest and on her fingertip braced against the ball of her thumb, poised to flick it away.

The dress made a cross noise like the sound of atomic fission,
whipped up a charge, let the dampener pounce on it, and then matched
the dampener emission, focusing it on the bullet. The dampener,
stupid machine that it was, had been duped into producing exactly the
wavelength necessary to vaporise the metal, a process that took so long
that Lila was knocked backwards off the target block and into the air
by the remaining kinetic burst that the dress chose simply to dissipate.

She landed on her feet, rubbing her chest where the impact and burning had made it sore and considered herself duly slapped for
making an attempt on the dress's virtue. She felt a moment's gladness
that the machines hadn't got the better of the magic.

Then there was a rustling, a snapping sound like sheets being
wound in, and then a yank that almost pulled her off her feet as the
nanotube armour became a Victorian ballgown of deep purple satin.
Two more yanks confirmed the corset laces being winched to within a
millimetre of snapping. All the breath shot out of Lila as the hard
steel boning in the corset compressed her to half her usual size. Itchy
lace gloves dotted with tiny blue pearls snarled up her arms to the
shoulder and a choker of purple velvet slid around her neck, piercing
the spiral of the faery key and embedding it half into her throat.
Combs jabbed her head as her hair was dragged back off her face. And
then, with a luxuriant sigh of silk and fillip of tulle, the dress relaxed
over the enormous, galleon-sized cage of the skirt and let its hems
drip fulsomely onto the floor. Red and gold dragons curled in the
fabric, scarlet teeth matching the scarlet laces that were threatening
to choke the life out of her, or would have if she hadn't had other
means of acquiring oxygen.

"Touche already!" Lila gasped faintly. She smelled burning plastic
and saw the dampener smouldering in its case. A bunch of emergency
lights and warnings were skating across her vision like the stars of a
knockout punch. Beneath all that her final readouts confirmed that the
dress, flimsy piece of oversensitive fashion that it was, had summoned
the disruptive power of a magnetar and contained it in a reticule of
abeyance fields the size of a pomander for a trillionth of a second.

Also, at those speeds, the Signal sounded much more like music.

Back in human time Lila struggled to bend and unplug the
charred dampener, feeling more cut in half than trimmed in. Bending
between waist and shoulder was not possible. She disassembled the
rifle and left it there for the armory staff to recover, along with the pulverized baton, before striding out and getting stuck in the doorway.

"Oh you have got to be kidding!" The cage was wedged. Before her,
a smooth, endless hill of shining deep plum with handstitched dragons
in lurid cartoon colours. After her, ditto. It filled the entire gangway
and sent purple light glowing on the pale green walls in a way that was
quite stomach churning. Lila tried to marshal the thing with her hands,
grabbing and squeezing, pushing and pulling, but if she got one bit to
budge another bit stuck fast. She was about three times wider than the
corridor, so there was a lot of skirt pressed to the walls. Finally, by
swaying side to side, pulling and shoving, she managed to reach the end
of the hall only to find she was unable to reach the door handle. A slippery mound of angry satin pushed her back. At full stretch her fingers
were just able to touch the smoothly rounded knob.

She contemplated slash and burn, but the experimental results
were only too clear on the subject of who was going to win a straight
fight. Other options, such as blowing out the door with short-range
shells, all seemed too destructive. Coupled with smashing the bike
into smithereens and wrecking half of the agency's antimagical units
she thought it was best not to. The humiliating route was clearly her
only choice, as the dress had no doubt planned.

Lila cleared her throat and opened a channel to the armory. "I seem
to be having a bit of trouble...." Was that laughter in the background?
Yes, it was. At least five individuals, three of them doing nothing to
smother the effect. She glanced up to her left and saw the camera's lens
glint with the reflected gleam of a dragon's tooth. "Opening the door
please," she said quietly with a sigh. "In your own time."

A few moments later the knob turned and the door inched inwards
to reveal Greer's heavily moustached face, a suspiciously pink face,
peering around. "Reverse," he said, trying to swing the door to illustrate the problem.

Lila backed up a few steps and considered mustering the kind of
dignity she'd seen on heroines in period romances when they had to
confront similar situations, but her flaming face refused to do haughty, an expression she'd not had much cause to use before, and instead she
felt herself snarling like the Wicked Witch of the West. She grabbed
up as much skirting as she could manage in both hands and stamped
forwards. At least the damned cage was so big it didn't impede her
stride. She could practice dropkicking severed heads under there all
night and nobody would know.

Greer held the door open awkwardly as she shoved and bustled her
way past him. Forced within a few inches of his face she could detect
smirking quite clearly.

"Why, I feel quite gallant," he said as she finally popped free into
the larger corridor, staggering slightly. The armorer and his friends
leaned over the security counter and stared at her with interest.

"Are you going to a costume party?" Greer said with almost perfect deadpan.

Lila straightened-it was hard not to-and tugged bits of skirt
and flounce into position. "Do you know of any?" As ripostes went it
was pretty pathetic. She ground her teeth.

"I'm sure something can be arranged." He put his hands behind his
back and circled her slowly, taking stock. "Colourful."

"Well, this is simply riveting," she said, trying for composure and
some smidgen of relevant dialogue. "But I have pressing matters to
attend. Perhaps we could continue our delightful conversation in my
office?"

"Yes, Miss Black," Greer said and extended his hand to indicate
that she could precede him, before adding, not sotto voce, "Misters
Gardner and Warrington you will lift your fingers off the local network
broadcast keys this instant. Agency business is no laughing matter, I'm
sure you will agree."

Lila stalked off without waiting to hear what rapier wit they were
going to come up with. Not that being taken seriously really mattered.
She ought to have been glad for some light relief, but the dress was so
fiendishly tight and her ribs so painful that she was just grateful that she managed to reach Malachi's office without killing anyone on the
way. Fortunately for her the door controls that let onto the courtyard
were operable remotely, if you have the time and inclination to hack
them via the building Al, which she did. As she swept through with
only a brief moment of amoebic awkwardness she heard Greer call
from behind her,

"Hey, you said your office."

She turned, impressed to see him involuntarily jump back half a
foot as the weighted hem spun around like a morningstar and rapped
his toes. "Yeah. And this isn't it."

"Am I to understand you're putting me off?"

She fished around for guile, but it was useless. "Yeah. Something
like that. I'll be right along there."

"I bet you will," he said, and marched past her to the open door,
where light was glowing out into the early evening dark. "Ho!" he said
as he saw the state of the place, "Bentley, what are you doing in here?
Spring cleaning?"

"I was waiting for Agent Black to ..." Bentley stopped at the
sight of Lila, then without changing expression in the slightest, continued, "... return as instructed."

"Well here she is, the little lady, so let's not tarry a second longer!"
Greer clapped his hands together and fixed Lila with a gleeful grin of
absolute demand. "Spill the beans."

Lila took a deep breath and explained the day's events, beginning
with the ghost ships and ending with the baton test.

"Why isn't he back, then?" Greer asked impatiently. "Faeries
fiddle the clocks. Every one of them I ever employed squeezed the
overtime until it squeaked without doing more than a two-hour day.
Where did he go?"

"Possibly he apprehended Jones and followed her," Bentley said in
her mild-coffee monotone.

Greer shoved his hands in his pockets and scuffed through some of the broken and fallen items on the floor. He instantly reminded Lila of
a kid scuffing through autumn leaves. "Nah," he said. "I don't think
so. Mal doesn't like ghosts any more than Mrs. Greer likes checking
her credit balance without giving me a call. He wouldn't go without
leaving a note if he was doing that. Did he leave a note?"