Coldbrook (Hammer) (40 page)

‘But she was brilliant,’ Drake continued. ‘My father worshipped her memory, and he must have read her diary a hundred times. The experiments, the celebration when they made their first cast. The Inquisitor visiting her. That came over as a madness, of course, but now we know better.’

‘She’s viewed as a monster now,’ Moira said. Jonah was taken aback by such a comment, and surprised at some of their almost mystical phraseology – veils, monsters.

‘That’s not her fault,’ Drake said. ‘Understand, this is all gleaned from her diaries, with plenty of guesswork thrown in. But my father always said Kathryn had a unique mind. He said she was able to embrace the imagination in her scientific studies. She was even . . .’ He frowned.

‘She had
faith
,’ Moira sneered, as if the word tasted foul. Jonah thought that he would have to ask about that.

‘Maybe that made it easier for the bastard thing to take her,’ Drake said. ‘I’ve always wondered. Though she was a woman of science, she was also a slave to mysticism.’

‘So what the hell
is
that thing haunting me?’ Jonah said.

‘Someone who perhaps has a sense of humour. Your world had the Spanish Inquisition?’

Jonah nodded.

‘We believe that they are Inquisitors of the multiverse, from a version of Earth so thoroughly obsessed by and convinced of their own exclusive holiness that they cannot allow any other.’

‘Cannot allow?’ Jonah said.

‘Maybe they found the fury disease in one reality, grasped its potential, and encouraged its spread,’ Drake continued. ‘Or maybe they conceived and released it themselves. Nurtured it from world to world to destroy everyone not of their Earth.’

‘That’s . . .’ Holly shook her head.

‘Genocide,’ Jonah said.

‘Billions killed across the multiverse,’ Drake said. ‘Trillions. Beyond counting. Infected, and waiting to rise again to attack those not infected. Every Earth explores, and when they break through to what they think will be somewhere similar they find furies.’

‘And there aren’t many worlds still holding out,’ Moira said.

‘Yours is!’ Jonah said. ‘Forty years you’ve been surviving, and—’

‘You can hardly call it surviving,’ Drake said, his composure slipping. ‘It’s barely existing.’

‘You said we might be able to fight back,’ Holly said. ‘What did you mean? How can you defeat something that’s already won?’

‘Kathyrn Coldbrook’s diaries,’ Drake said. ‘She sensed something observing her even before she and my father succeeded with their first casting. In later entries she reveals her belief that her Inquisitor guided her towards success, though not quite the success he intended. And following our eventual infection he courted her, preying on her guilt with nightmare images that she noted in her diary. Some of which you might recognise, Jonah, were you to read it.’

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘The last few pages are very confused. Painful to read. So much self-doubt as she denied what she was seeing, what the Inquisitor was doing to her. As he was
luring
her. It’s as if she was trying to keep hold of herself, but also being torn in other ways. And one day . . . she vanished.’

Silence descended, and Jonah glanced at the other three people around the table. Drake and Moira displayed a sadness that seemed to fit their hard faces well: a familiar emotion. Holly was staring down at her hands.

‘Bill Coldbrook died,’ Jonah said. ‘I took over his work.’

‘And have you ever felt watched?’ Drake said, leaning forward again.

‘Yes,’ Jonah said. ‘And so did Bill. I think that made him paranoid and drove him to suicide.’

‘And now an Inquisitor is after Jonah,’ Holly said.

‘They take you,’ Drake said. ‘That’s what Kathryn seemed to imply. Across secret bridges and through unknown wormholes those bastards have created with technology that must be so similar to yours, or ours. They take you back and
convert
you. And then you go out as one of them and oversee the destruction of another Earth.’

‘This was meant to be so special,’ Jonah said.

‘Countless Earths think that.’

‘So those things helped us to make the breach?’ Holly asked. She sounded hurt, and Jonah felt the same. He thought back to Bill before his suicide, what he had accomplished, the breakthroughs he had made, and Jonah tried to see where the tipping point had been. It had still taken them ten years after Bill died to complete the project, and there had been several failed attempts. But they could never have succeeded without Bill’s radical, groundbreaking work as their foundation. And somewhere in that foundation had been a rock cast by something alien.

‘It’s pure evil,’ Jonah said.

‘So you have to
fight
it!’ Holly said. ‘It might not be over.’

Holly felt a rush of hope. Drake had shown her views of her own blighted world in the casting room, and Vic had confirmed those images in their short conversation.
But now they had a chance – a challenge – and they had to grasp it and make it work.

And Vic was coming back.

‘We need access to Mannan,’ Jonah said.

Moira and Drake leaned in close to each other, whispered something that no one else could hear: urgent, serious. Then Drake stood and shook his head.

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘We can’t bring him here.’

‘We don’t need to.’ Jonah stood as well, walked around the table and stood in front of the man from another world.

He held out his hand.

After a moment’s hesitation Drake took it, and smiled. ‘That’s something I thought I’d never do,’ he said. ‘Shaking hands is so . . . mannered. It’s something we only ever see in memory casts.’

Holly found Drake compelling, almost hypnotic. He carried himself well, and had a natural grace and intelligence. But she realised now that there was something else – he was completely out of place here, no matter how relaxed he seemed.

‘You must go through,’ Holly said. ‘You
have
to, Jonah. I’ll stay here and wait for Vic and the others. I can check the systems, make sure the repair holds, run some diagnostics on the core. And I’ll try and figure out how to get them down here when they arrive.’

‘Perhaps Moira can stay with you?’ Drake suggested.
‘She services our casting-field generators. I’m sure she’d be fascinated with your technology.’

‘Yes!’ Moira said.

‘Of course,’ Holly said. ‘She saved my life. I owe her a tour, at least.’

‘I’ll leave this with you,’ Jonah said, placing his satphone on the table. ‘Marc thinks they’re three or four hours out.’ He waved her over and they embraced. ‘Get them in safe and sound. The girl’s precious. She might be priceless.’

Jayne felt the churu settling into her joints and bones, seizing them, a shadow in her mind that was grinning in anticipation at her having to move again. Worse, they were now all talking about her. Sean had tried slipping off her headphones, thinking she was asleep. But she’d slapped his hand away, felt his chest moving as he laughed softly, realising more and more how strong she was. Or, at least, how strong she wanted to be. Leaning against him was the only thing that made her feel remotely safe, and she sensed their mutual respect growing. She knew what he had seen of France on the guy’s laptop screen. And he was still trying to protect her.

‘Because Jonah said they have someone immune on
their side, too,’ Marc said. ‘
That
’s why we need to get to Coldbrook.’

‘So what happens when we get there?’ Sean asked.

Marc was silent for a while and Jayne lifted her head to look back, grimacing against the pain. Marc had turned in his seat and was looking down at her, tapping one finger against his headphones.

‘Fuck you all!’ Jayne said. ‘You talk about me, I’m gonna hear it. You have no idea what the fuck I’ve been through, and who I’ve seen die, and thanks for rescuing us and everything, but you are
not
gonna talk about me as if I’m not here. Or as if I’m a . . . a fucking
animal
, to be experimented on.’

‘Oh, hey,’ Marc said, and even through the electronic crackle she could hear the shame in his voice. ‘I meant nothing, Jayne.’

‘I got a question,’ Sean said. ‘What the fuck is going on? And that’s just for starters. To follow that one up, what the fuck is a “breach”? And who is on the other side? Is this a war?’

‘The man said “fuck”,’ the little girl said, opening her eyes, and Jayne couldn’t hold back a laugh. Her mother quickly plucked the headphones from her daughter’s ears and hugged her.

‘Vic, you want to give them the quick version?’ Marc said.

‘Well . . .’ Vic said, and he glanced nervously between
Jayne and Sean. She tried to sit up straighter, then actually cried out in pain as her hips flared in agony, and growled against the fire searing through her veins.

Vic’s wife let out a startled cry.

‘Hey, no, I was like this long before I was bitten,’ Jayne said, remembering the passengers on the plane – their fear, their pack mentality. This was a much smaller aircraft, with nowhere to run. ‘I have a disease called churu. It’s not contagious, and—’

‘Churu?’ Marc said. ‘You have
that
?’

‘Since birth. It sucks.’

‘I’ll bet,’ he said, thoughtful. ‘Tell them, Vic. Then Jayne and I need to talk.’

‘Zombies are a disease, and I’m the cure, is that it?’ she asked, only half joking. Nobody laughed.

‘Well, here’s the idiot’s guide,’ Vic said. ‘Coldbrook is a big experimental complex built beneath the Appalachians.’

‘Very James Bond,’ Sean said.

‘My boss Jonah Jones has been there since it began over twenty years ago, and he’s been running it for ten, trying to create a path between this world and another. Across the multiverse. Find an alternate Earth.’

‘I take it back,’ Sean said. ‘It’s
Stargate
.’

‘It’s neither,’ Vic said defensively. ‘It’s the most important scientific experiment for decades. It’s SETI, with proper funding. It’s the Large Hadron Collider, five steps on.’

‘Then why haven’t I heard of it?’ Sean asked.

‘You read the scientific journals regularly?’ Vic asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘It went wrong?’ Jayne asked.

‘No,’ Vic said. ‘It went right. More right than we ever really hoped. Jonah’s the genius, I’m just an engineer and the science is sometimes beyond me. But the concept of what we were doing set my imagination on fire. And, a week ago, we did it. We formed a breach across the multiverse, between this Earth and another.’

‘This came through,’ Sean said.

‘And it spread.’

‘Were there no safeguards?’ Jayne asked, amazed, terrified. ‘I mean . . . when they first brought back rocks and stuff from the moon, you know? They kept it all locked away. Isolated.’

‘There were safeguards,’ Vic said. He glanced at his wife and daughter, and his wife looked down into her lap. ‘I made a mistake – and it’s out because of me.’

Jayne closed her eyes and the first thing she saw was Tommy’s head changing shape as the bullet hit him.

‘So now . . .’ Sean said, and his voice sounded hollow.

‘Now we have to try and stop it,’ Marc said. ‘It’s spreading incredibly quickly.’

‘How come?’ Sean asked. His voice was softer now. Angry. Jayne felt his heart racing.

‘It’s no normal disease,’ Marc said. ‘That’s a given,
but this fucker is different from anything I can think of. Think of a common cold, spread by airborne particles and contact contagion – rub your nose, open a door, next person who touches the handle can pick it up. Now move that one step on – everyone with the cold does everything they can to spread it. That’s this disease. It’s active, not passive. It doesn’t sit there and wait to be spread, it spreads itself. And infection is instant.’ He fell silent, and Jayne could almost hear him thinking.

‘Except with me,’ Jayne said.

‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘Except with you. So tell me about your churu.’

‘You sound as if you know it.’

‘I’m a phorologist, but before I specialised I did my thesis on rare conditions like yours.’

Jayne told him. About how she’d had the condition ever since she could remember, and when she was a child it had been an inconvenience more than anything – sore feet when she ran too much, aching limbs in the mornings. About how when she hit puberty it grew a hundred times worse, and ever since then she’d lived with the joint pains, the headaches and intermittent churu comas, the daily massages. She said more than she’d told Sean during the hours when they’d been stranded on the jet but held back the tears, because she had defeated self-pity years ago.

‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ Marc said. ‘So far there’s no confirmation of anyone else surviving a bite,
anywhere
. If you’re bitten, and the skin breaks, that’s it.’

‘What does that mean?’ Jayne asked. ‘That you can make a cure from my blood?’

‘A cure?’ Marc shrugged, averting his gaze. ‘It takes years to develop vaccines. But we don’t have years, or even weeks. We have days.’

‘I see,’ Jayne said. ‘So I’ll be experimented upon.’

‘Never without your permission,’ Marc said, and she could hear the strength in his voice. He was the man in charge here and she was glad for that. He sounded like someone she could trust.

‘It’ll cost you,’ she said, wincing when she tried to smile. ‘I like good beer. Imported, preferably British ale.’

Marc chuckled, and the others smiled. It seemed to light up the cabin brighter than daylight ever could.

‘We believe the Inquisitors favour the geniuses, and the depressives,’ Drake said.

‘How can you be so sure?’

The tall man smiled, but the expression did not reach his eyes. ‘Years of study and guesswork. Kathryn Coldbrook disappeared from sight. I believe that, to accept such a fate, the victim must be without hope.’

‘That’s why it shows me the fates of worlds,’ Jonah said, understanding at last.

He felt the immensity of time, space, and reality, and recognised his own size and worth among it all. He was a short-lived animal in the ever-evolving, ever-expanding actuality of the multiverse, a speck of sand on a world where time had reduced
everything
to sand. He had always done his best. But however much he had done, and however much he still had left to do, he was nothing compared to this.