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She looked at his face. "Have you seen it?"
"Yes."
"Is it amazing?"
"I don't know. I don't know what it is," he said. "It's an artefact. Big. There's technology to reverse-engineer. Decades of study and analysis. Fuck alone knows where it came from or how long it's been down there. Yes, it's amazing."
She sighed.
"You can appreciate why this is high confidence," she said. "Something like this, it has to be contained, controlled. It's sensitivity-adverse. The implications…"
She looked at him.
"Even the Bloc understands that," she said. "They came in silent and ruthless for precisely the same reason. They wanted it contained as much as we did, just under their terms. They understand what's at stake."
"Everyone should know," said Falk. "Everyone. This is too big to swallow up and classify."
"That's a naive attitude."
"Not really. It's a matter of public interest, Tedders."
She shook her head.
"I've heard enough, I think," she said. "Sorry, soldier. I'm sorry about this situation. I can't pretend it's not going to get difficult for you. You simply don't get it. You're not seeing the whole picture."
"You just don't know me very well, Tedders," he replied. "Don't walk away. I've got six people down below. Three SO troopers, three civilians, Bloc nationals. All seven of us are going to be escorted out of here and looked after. We're not going to be rendered and silenced."
"I'm not in charge of anything, I–"
"You're going to have to persuade Human Services that it's just not in their interests to harm us," said Falk.
"Well, they won't see it like that."
"They will when they realise the story is already out."
"This whole operation is secure," said Tedders. She cleared her throat. "This zone has been unlinked for seventy-two hours."
"Not as secure as you think," he said. "The story's out, Tedders. Out and gone. It's too late to pretend you can contain it. So it's too late to bother trying to win or enforce our silence."
"That's not true," she said. She smiled and shook her head sadly. "Nice try. I can see you're desperate to help your people. But there's no way the story has got out of this zone."
"Reuters already has it."
"Bullshit," she said.
"No, actually. Do you know what I'm going to do now, Tedders?"
"What?"
"I'm going to show you my A game," said Falk.
She narrowed her eyes, stared at him.
"My name is Lex Falk," he said.
"What? Falk? More bullshit."
"Lex Falk. The sooner you believe it, the sooner we can deal. My name is Lex Falk."
"Shut the fuck up. I've met Lex Falk, and–"
"I'm connected by sensory repositioning to a location in Shaverton," he said. "The exact location is, as you fucks like to say, hardly material. Reuters has it. Reuters has the story. Even this conversation we're having is being relayed, word for word, real time."
"What the fuck is this nonsense?" asked Tedders.
She turned and began to walk away.
"It was a small, family-run place off Equestrian," he called out after her. "And the best part was, the chickeneffect parmigiana arrived during your lifetime."
She stopped walking away.
THIRTY-THREE
They gave him a cane, and after he had learned to walk with it, he kept it for effect. An unseasonable heat had descended on Shaverton. The windows of the glass masts glinted like mirrors. The bugs were swarming, and everyone smelled like they had been embalmed with Insect-Aside.
The sky was a spoiled cream shade of yellow when the car brought him to the veterans' hospital on the Cape Highway. The place was pleasant-looking, a sun-baked compound of white Early Settlement style buildings on a plot planted with snowgums. He showed his papers at the front desk, and then again at a guardpost outside the trauma ward. The SOMD staffers went through his press accreditation, and the embossed permits with the Human Services hologram tags.
"This way," said the nurse who came to meet him inside the ward. "It's just down here."
She looked flushed, but the place was quite cool. He thought it was probably a byproduct of her pink tunic and the beige walls.
"How is he?" he asked.
"Stable," she said. "Not out of the woods. I'm sorry, I meant to ask, are you family?"
"No."
"A colleague?"
"Something like that."
She led him into a small waiting area. A glass wall looked into a private room. Through the glass, he could see the figure in the bed, pale, still, linked to full life support. He could just hear the rhythmic ping of the monitors, the pump of the ventilator.
He saw the dressing covering the cheek. The memory was physical, like a bruise. He raised his hand involuntarily and touched his own cheek.
There was no hole, or trace of a scar.
Having come all that way, he felt he ought to go in. Say something. Anything. The reminder on his celf had pinged just before he arrived at the hospital. Diary update. His driver was scheduled to leave in four days and he was due to report to the Terminal in two hours. He didn't have long, and he was pretty sure he was never coming back. He could surely manage some platitude about how everything had changed, and they'd been part of it?
"Can I go in and sit with him?" he asked.
"I suppose so, Mr Falk," replied the nurse. She opened the door, then lowered her voice. "Please don't expect too much," she said. "Private Bloom has very limited periods of consciousness. He drifts in and out. He probably won't recognise you."
"I understand," he replied, smiling.
"To be honest," she added, leaning forward to confide, "I don't think he knows who he is most of the time."
Falk nodded.
"I know how he feels," he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Abnett is a
New York Times
bestselling novelist and award-winning comic book writer. He has written over thirty-five novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt's Ghosts series and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His novels
Horus Rising
,
Legion
and
Prospero Burns
(for the Black Library) and his Torchwood novel
Border Princes
(for the BBC) were all bestsellers. His novel
Triumff
, for Angry Robot, was published in 2009 and longlisted for the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novel. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.
Follow him on Twitter
@VincentAbnett
and online at
www.danabnett.com
With Thanks to Marco and Nik.
ANGRY ROBOT
A member of the Osprey Group
Midland House, West Way
Botley, Oxford
OX2 0HP
UK
Tarfu
Copyright © Dan Abnett 2011
Dan Abnett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-85766-092-3
eBook set by ePub Services dot net
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
