Fractions (37 page)

‘What on earth did you tell him was setting it off?'

‘Steel hoops,' said Cat smugly.

‘Guess he was too embarrassed to check.'

Cat looked sideways at him. ‘It's
true
,' she said. ‘The guns and the shell-cases are all plastic.'

 

They reached the top of Crouch Hill. The pedicab's backup electric motor stopped; there was a moment of poise as the driver took the weight on the pedals again. Jordan looked at the city, sharp and clear, less hazy than usual, in early-autumn sunlight. He didn't glance at the house from which he'd seen this view so many times. The silver dirigibles moved above it, their paths intricate, crossing over each other.

‘Look at the airships!' Cat said.

‘Yeah, I've never seen so many in one—'

‘No,
look
!'

Things were dropping from the airships, black dots – Jordan turned to look at the closest, floating above Finsbury Park. He saw the canopies open, and tried to scan the whole sky, see everything at once. All around, as far as human eye could see, parachutes and hang-gliders descended on the open spaces of the city like a selective fall of multicoloured snow.

‘Air hostesses!' Cat said, and then wouldn't say anything else.

 

The nearest parachutes came down out of sight, a kilometre or so eastward. Jordan was relieved they hadn't landed at the near end of the park—they were probably going for the tactically more important junction at Seven Sisters.

Fonthill Road was deserted. Jordan paid the cabbie in B-marks, gaining a surprised look of thanks, and walked with Cat to the doorway of the block where he'd last worked, less than a fortnight ago. A Warrior stood outside. His submachine-gun covered their approach. The sensation that at any second he could be ripped in half was a new one for Jordan.

‘What's your business, sir?'

‘River Valley Distribution,' Jordan said, passing him a laminated card.

‘And who have you come to see?'

Jordan smiled politely. ‘MacLaren & Jones.' If he knew his former partners, nothing short of shells coming through the window would keep them away from their desks.

The Warrior passed the card swiftly through a reader, and peered at the result. Jordan tried not to hold his breath. His fictitious company's status as an approved supplier, left over from his
SILK.ROOT
program, was the nearest he had to a security clearance.

The guard nodded and handed the card back. ‘You'll find them up the stairs and on the right.'

He stepped aside. Jordan held the door open for Cat. She went up the stairs with surprising speed, and let Jordan lead the way into the offices. The great workroom was almost empty, most of the screens dead.

Debbie Jones, who'd usually worked evenings when Jordan had been her partner, was standing by the desk they'd serially shared. She faced the door, evidently alerted she had a visitor. The screen behind her bled with the colours of falling shares.

‘Jordan! I never expected to see you back here!' She sounded half-welcoming, half-disapproving. Jordan had always thought of her as quite a nice girl, intelligent but conventional; unmemorable oval face, straight long hair, straight long dress. Her glance flicked to Cat and back to Jordan with a look of marginally increased understanding that he was beginning to find irritatingly familiar. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Do you know why I left?'

She shook her head. ‘And I'm not interested, frankly.' Another glance at Cat. ‘It was a bit inconsiderate of you. Though in all fairness we didn't do too badly out of your selling out to us.'

‘Glad to hear it,' Jordan said. ‘I'm sorry about the inconvenience I must have caused you.' He wondered if she knew he'd left Beulah City entirely. If she hadn't, it suggested Mrs Lawson had been more anxious to cover up than to investigate.

‘Actually,' he went on with an embarrassed-sounding laugh, ‘I'm not here to see you at all. I just have some matters to clear up with Mrs Lawson. Security stuff, you know?'

Debbie frowned. ‘I don't see—'

Jordan looked past her. ‘Hey, what's happened to the Dow Jones?'

Debbie looked over her shoulder. ‘Oh, rats!' She sat down and started rapid-fire keying. In the thirty seconds of distraction this afforded Jordan walked briskly to Mrs Lawson's office.

‘Where is everybody?' Cat asked, looking around.

‘They must be on strike.'

‘Ha, ha.'

He knocked on Mrs Lawson's door.

‘Come in.'

Jordan looked at Cat. ‘After you, lady.'

Cat opened the door and sailed through. Jordan hung back for a moment, then stepped in and closed it. Mrs Lawson was standing behind her pine desk, her hands on top of her head. Her whole attention was on Cat's derringer; her face showed shocked bewilderment.

Then she looked up and saw Jordan. Her expression deepened to one of utter dismay. Her mouth opened…

Cat raised one hand. Mrs Lawson's lips clenched.

Jordan climbed over the desk to the terminal, avoiding passing between her and Cat. He tapped in the code and hit Enter.

 

The ghosts were gone now, and the animal mind of the gun. He was on his own, looking down at the country like a god. It was more than a map, more than a view from a fantastic unclouded height. A moment's attention was all it took to take him close. He saw armoured columns, and he could zoom in on individual tanks. He saw the sinking silk, the rising smoke, and focused in on a city centre where
ANR
fighters attacked a police barracks with nerve-shattering ferocity. He heard the yelled slogans, the shouted pain.

He was there and he wanted to be there. He looked at London, saw the converging lines, the closing circles, the bright sector of Norlonto and, just to its south, a dark patch, a blindspot. It too lit up, flickering (hand over bank of switches), and he turned away.

He looked up and saw them beside him in the imagined sky. They were exactly like the tiny sparks of light he'd sometimes seen when gazing at a clear blue sky. On this scale they were shining silver ships,
UFO
s insolently dancing in the air over Britain, alien intelligences waiting to be noticed.

He reached out to warn them.

 

Jordan turned away from the terminal.

Cat chucked him a roll of heavy-duty tape from her handbag.

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Lawson,' he said, peeling off a metre of it. ‘You know how it is. Nothing personal.'

Mrs Lawson nodded. ‘That's quite all right, Jordan.'

He taped her securely to the office chair, after checking as best he could that the chair itself didn't conceal any alarm switches. If she had one about her person, she'd probably used it already, and in any case they could hardly remove her teeth one by one. Then he taped the chair to the radiator at the window.

When he was about to tape her mouth she shook her head.

‘No need,' she said. ‘The room's completely soundproof. I'd appreciate it if you'd let someone know where I am once you feel safe.'

‘No problem about that, but I'll still have to do it. Voice activation.'

Mrs Lawson looked at him as if she'd never heard of it.

‘You're taking this very well,' said Cat, still keeping her covered. ‘Something we should know, yeah?'

Mrs Lawson laughed. ‘Oh, no, nobody's on the way. It's only that I'm quite used to interpreting finger movements as keystrokes – years of watching people enter passwords. You
were
rather fond of Engels and Lucretius, weren't you Jordan? I recognized the code you tapped in just now.' She looked from him to Cat, and back. ‘Is this the Catherin Duvalier I've heard so much about? Did she persuade you that Kohn was wrong and Donovan was right?'

‘What's Donovan got to do with this?' Jordan snapped at her, baffled. He didn't understand the reference to Kohn either.

Mrs Lawson gave him an impatient, scornful look. ‘Oh, stop playing games, Jordan. Who else would want to turn off my security software?'

‘The
ANR
, if you must know,' Jordan said, stung by her insinuations.

She stared at him for a moment and then began to giggle, at first in a schoolgirlish, sniggering tone and then with a rising pitch that bordered on hysterical. In a surge of fury and disgust he slapped the tape across her mouth.

‘You're the one who's playing games,' he said bitterly.

Tears leaked from her eyes and her shoulders quaked.

‘Breathe OK?'

‘Mmm-hmm.'

He moved behind Cat and opened the door. They backed out and walked quickly to the exit. Debbie Jones leapt up from her seat.

‘What's going on?' she demanded.

Jordan hesitated. Debbie turned away from him and pointed to the screen. Mandelbrot snowflakes drifted across it, faded, and died to a dot.

‘System crash,' Jordan said, thinking on his feet. ‘Mrs Lawson's trying to fix it. She's a bit caught up in it but she'd like to see you in about ten minutes. Some files I left lying about,' he added in a vaguely apologetic tone. ‘See you around.'

He followed Cat out, aware that Debbie was still standing and watching them with the expression of someone who just knows they've missed something, but…

‘That stuff about Donovan,' Cat said as they left the office. ‘D'you think that's what she thought?'

‘Could be,' Jordan said. ‘Or a bit of disinformation. She's an expert at it.'

‘And why did she mention Moh?'

Jordan stood still. The question was nagging at him. How
had
she connected him with Moh? Then he remembered.

‘She didn't say Moh, she said
Kohn.
Maybe she meant Josh Kohn, she's old enough to know about him and the Plan, and she knew I'd done something on the Plan.'

‘Yeah, he has a reputation,' Cat said. ‘But how did she guess who I was?'

Jordan grinned. The answer seemed obvious after his trawls through the net. ‘You've got a reputation, too!'

Jordan began to descend the stairs backwards, holding the rail with one hand and reaching the other towards Cat.

‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,' she said.

She returned to the top and slid her thumbs deftly around her waist, then shoved down hard on her skirt. With a rending noise it came away from the bodice. She stepped out of the collapsing structure.

‘Velcro,' she explained. ‘Gimme my jacket.'

Jordan took it from the bag and felt a sudden impulse to be free himself. He scrambled out of the suit and into his jeans as Cat did something arcane with the crinoline frame, folding and telescoping it to flat quarter-circles, making it and the skirts vanish into the bag. (How do they
do
these things? he wondered. Where do they
learn
them? And
what are the military applications
?).

He looked at her, tall boots and short guns, tight jeans, bodice tucked into them like a fancy fitted shirt under the big jacket. She put one hip forward and held a fist to it.

‘Calamity Jane rides again,' she said.

‘Minor detail,' said Jordan, glancing down the stairs. ‘The guard. Unless you're going for the final shot of Butch and Sundance.'

‘Nah,' she sneered. She passed him one of the side-arms and signed to him to follow her down the steps. At the foot they crept to the door and flattened against the wall. Cat reached out and very slowly turned the knob and inched the door open, then let it swing inwards.

There was a rush of noise. Cat waited for a moment and risked a look around the jamb. She laughed and stepped into the doorway. The Warrior had left, and in the street there was…

‘A multitude,' Jordan said.

 

Bleibtreu-Fèvre had found an antique
CRT
buried among the vast arrays of screens. On experimenting with it he discovered it was a television. It picked up only four channels, none of which showed anything but ballet or marching bands. The old state broadcasting system, responding to a crisis of the state in the time-honoured fashion. He flicked idly between
Les Sylphides
and the 2039 Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

He felt exhausted, burnt-out on anti-som, fatalistic. They were doomed. He had worked with Donovan all night, helping as best he could while the old crank honed and refined his hunter-killer viruses, repeatedly launching them with high hopes only to see them snuffed out by Melody Lawson's diabolically effective countermeasures.

With his inside knowledge and Donovan's hacking expertise, they eavesdropped on communications between Stasis and Space Defense. Most of it was unbreakably encrypted, but from what they could pick up it was obvious
SD
was in the final stages of confirmation that a genuine emergency existed, working through the fail-safes, the dual-keys, to the inevitable, fated and fatal decision that the datasphere was beyond the command of man and had to be destroyed at any cost.

He'd considered contacting
SD
or Stasis directly, telling them what was going on, getting them to force that stupid, stubborn Christian woman to disable her countermeasures and let Donovan have at least one good shot at the
AI
…but he knew in his altered bones it was hopeless, that even if he could reach a high enough command level they'd just treat it as further confirmation that the emergency was real.

They were doomed.

Donovan's shout of triumph brought him to his feet. The old man dashed from terminal to terminal, whirled his arms in elaborate movements, wrestled with virtual shapes. He paused to yell at Bleibtreu-Fèvre: ‘She must have changed her mind! The counterviruses are gone!'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre moved out of Donovan's way and watched as he slowed, wound down, and eventually stopped to look around from screen to screen.

‘They're free,' he said. ‘The very best, keyed to the Watchmaker's memes.' He smiled at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, and at that moment he did not look old, or mad, or evil – the very opposite: he stood proud and glad, a white magician who had saved a great but simple folk from forces darker than they had the strength to know.