I Am Margaret (37 page)

“Because he refuses to leave. He goes into Salperton now on your bike to do his work—says since Father Peter’s gone, it’s just him, so how can he leave? I can’t shift him, short of tying him up and cycling him across the county border. And you know, I don’t reckon I could take him. So I bring him as much food as I can and make sure I’m not followed.”

“
Ah.” No surprises there. But I couldn’t dwell on it. I was too busy fighting off visions of the Resistance getting inside the Facility and killing every guard in the place. “Bane, please, please tell me your plan doesn’t involve anyone actually getting
into
the Facility?”

“No, don’t worry.”

“Are you sure? You know what they’ll do if they get inside—if you didn’t before you should now. They’ll kill everyone.”

Bane snorted and his voice was suddenly hard. “Facility guards. Forgive me if I don’t get all broken-hearted about a few
Facility
guards.”

“They don’t deserve to be murdered, Bane. It’s a job, a job everyone in the Bloc condones, a job everyone pays for in their taxes. Everyone is responsible for the Facilities. Are you going to start killing random people in the street?”

“I’m not planning on killing anyone. Though I still think it’s one thing to sit at a distance and try not to think about a distasteful subject, and another to take money for guarding innocent people and marching them off to their deaths!”

“Well, maybe, but who are we to say they deserve to die? There’s a fellow called Watkins, very conscientious, worked here for years and years, but he’s got galloping arthritis in his left hand. They’ve offered him a new one, but he’s a conscientious objector. So should he die, for working here, or live, for being a conchie?”

It was possible to opt out of a medical transplant on grounds of conscience—but you had to make the Divine denial to get away with it. Those in the Underground generally kept away from doctors and hospitals if remotely possible, to make sure the question didn’t arise.

“Funny place for a conchie.”

“Well, some of the guards work here to try and make sure we’re looked after properly. There’s a woman called Sally like that. Watkins might be another, though he hasn’t said so. You want to kill people like that?”

“Look, stop worrying about it. They’re just going to make a nuisance of themselves from outside.”

They’d try their best to kill the guards in the towers, in other words. What’d I put in motion?

“I take it they don’t have any nonLee rifles?”

“
NonLee
rifles
? They’re cutting edge, Margo. Who can afford them? Anyway,” he added bitterly, “they laugh at nonLees.”

It was my hands which were clenching and unclenching now.

“Bane… no offense, but how can you be sure they’re going to follow the plan? You’re not in the Resistance: you don’t actually have any authority over them, do you.”

He just shrugged.

“Margo, the Resistance are actually pretty good at following plans and conserving resources, including themselves. They’d have been wiped out by now, otherwise. Problem the other day was, no one told me the plan. But I’m in on this one and they’ll stick to it. Even the Resistance don’t like to fool around with a two-hundred-meter killing zone covered by machine guns.”

“They’ll let us chance that, then.”

“Yes, they will. Sounds like you won’t be sorry.”

“No, I won’t, Bane. There are degrees of guilty, as you should appreciate. And a lot of the guards aren’t very, in my opinion.” There was the Menace and Finchley... I found my mouth adding, “I’m not saying there aren’t one or two whose characters would be much improved by a bullet in the head…”

“Margo!” Bane sounded shocked.

“I’m not saying I want it to happen!” I added hastily, my brain catching up with my tongue. “Forget I said that, would you? I shouldn’t have.”

“Just what have these one or two characters done to you?” demanded Bane.

“I’ll tell you all about it in a week or so’s time, Lord willing. Now…” I hesitated. We’d barely discussed what needed discussing yet. “D’you think if you get down in the bottom of that ditch, we’ll still be able to hear each other?”

“Hmm,” said Bane, but perhaps he also suspected the guards might be unusually alert, for all he said was, “Let’s try it, then.” He disappeared from sight and there were a few tiny scuffling noises. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We’d better get down to business; I’m sorry I went on for so long.”

“Don’t apologize, Bane, or you’ll make me mad. Now, let’s make sure we don’t forget anything.”

“Right. We don’t need to waste time going into the ins and outs of each other’s plans, we’ve just got to arrange the timings. I have got one question, though. If you’re going to get hold of some real nonLees, can’t you get uniforms at the same time and just walk across the exercise yards to the towers? Why do you need the diversion so desperately?”

Was Bane not quite so comfortable with the source of the diversion as he had been? Good. Unfortunately…

“If it was that simple, everyone would escape. Look, it didn’t take me any time at all to realize the only way to get out was to take a couple of towers out of commission. Well, if I can think of that, so can a lot of other reAssignees and certainly so can the EGD. Jon and I have worked this out very carefully.

“To get into a tower you have to get to the base of it without being shot—easy enough in the daytime, during exercise, and with a uniform, simple at night too. But a card isn’t enough to get you in once you’re there, that’s the problem. There’s a camera as well and the guards in the tower have to recognize you before they’ll unlock the door.

“Hence the diversion. The uniforms will get a pair safely across the yard to each tower—though the internal guards have slightly different ones, you know, but it’ll be close enough, especially with a bit of chaos for good measure.

“We’ll swipe a card and claim to be reinforcements, keeping too close to the camera to be identified, and with the tower under attack the chances are extremely high the guards will let us in without thinking to insist on a normal ID. The first person to the top of the stairs will take the guards out and the second one will be there for… backup.”

“You mean if the first person gets shot,” said Bane grimly, clearly thinking of those machine guns.

“It’s a precaution only. The person going in will have a nonLee drawn in their hand. No way will they turn those big guns in time.”

“And will one of the first people be you?”

“Of course it will, Bane,” I said impatiently. “You’ve made me do target shooting with you often enough. I may be the only person in the dorm who’s ever even fired a gun. I really don’t know who to trust with the other tower. I think I’ll have to instigate a very noisy game and hold trials with the air gun, actually. If they can’t hit a barn door, all the surprise in the world won’t help.”

“Try Jon.”

“
Jon?
He can’t
see
.”

“No, and he can’t hit an inanimate object to save his life. But he can nail a breathing target every time. You know my laser shooter game? He was less high-minded than you about it—or a lot more bored, I think that was it. We used to play that and he’d get me almost as often as I got him, in the end. I reckon he could do it.”

“Hmm. Well, I still need two backups who won’t shoot themselves by accident.”

“Make sure they’re smart enough to overrule their subconscious and pull the trigger,” said Bane bluntly. “Because nonLees are so new, I’ve heard people find it almost as hard to actually shoot people with them as with an ordinary gun. ‘Cause we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of years of conditioning telling us that if we point that thing and go bang, we kill someone.”

“Point taken.”

“There’s something else,” said Bane. “If you fail to gain access to the tower, they won’t be able to get their machine guns trained on you down there, but if you run back across the yard, they’ll have you. So stay put. And fire this straight up over the tower.” He slid back up into a sitting position and passed another package through.

I eased the wrappings off and found a pair of squat, fat barrelled pistols.

“What are these?”

“Signal guns. If you can’t take the tower, fire one of those and we’ll… deal with it.”

“Deal with it,” I said flatly.

“Yes.”

“Do I want to know?”

“I doubt it. It’s just a contingency plan, anyway.”

“If you’ve got the means to ‘deal with’ the towers from outside, I’m surprised you’re not all for it,” I couldn’t help remarking.

I saw his wince.

“Couple of weeks ago, I was, as it happens,” he said quietly. “Save putting you at risk and everything. But… it’s not as simple as that, is it?”

“And your friends are happy to let us have all the fun?”

“They’re not my friends!” snapped Bane, then went on more calmly, “Dealing with the towers from the forestline means using extremely expensive and hard to obtain resources. They’re quite happy to leave it to you.”

A pair of bazookas, in other words. Two dead guards in each tower. I weighed the flare gun in my hand. Could I really point this thing at the sky and fire it, knowing what would happen?

“Father Mark asked me to tell you something when I gave you those,” said Bane. “He said to remind you every right comes with a corresponding duty. He seemed to think you’d know what that meant.”

I bit my lip. The right to life. My right to life. Which meant the right to self defense. The use of reasonable force against an aggressor. But our faith called us to love everyone and defined real love as considering the other person more important than ourselves. So many Believers would forfeit their right to self defense rather than harm the other.

But with the right to life came the duty to protect life. Especially that of the innocent, and those who couldn’t defend themselves. If it was only me escaping, I could refuse to use the flare gun and accept the consequences—though in my current predicament, it might require more strength than I possessed. But I couldn’t make that choice for the seventy others whose lives I’d a duty to save if I could.

“How do I use this thing?”

I heard Bane let out a relieved breath.

“There’s a button to press to open the breech, like a shotgun…” I held one of the guns inside the hatch so he could see what I was doing. “That’s right. You put the shells in rimless end first; it only takes one at a time. Then snap it shut, take off the safety, point and fire. Don’t point it at anyone—well, you can if they’re bothering you. And if you have to fire it, stay in the doorway at the base of the tower until… until things stop flying around.”

“Right. I think that’s all we need to say about the towers. Let’s sort out the timings. Could you get back in that ditch?”

Bane slithered back down and I breathed a little easier.

“So when’s it all happening?” I asked.

“
Well, the book’s being published next Tuesday. That
you
wrote the book will be a much bigger story if lots of people have already read it. So my… friend… the reporter will give the story to one person in each major paper, but not until late on Thursday, giving them just a few hours to write their pieces before the midnight deadline for the Friday papers. Leaving the minimum amount of time for tongues to flap,” he said darkly.

“
My friend’s getting an exclusive on the escape out of it, in case you were wondering. Anyway, we’re thinking evening of the Friday for the escape. Working on the assumption that the EuroGov may not be very quick deciding what to do. They’ve got to read the newspapers, read the book, look at the evidence and only then worry what to do about you. And it won’t occur to them that
you
could possibly be going be going anywhere.”

But my stomach turned over at the thought of sitting here for a whole day once the EuroGov knew the truth.

“
What if…” My voice squeaked slightly and I cleared my throat. “What if someone in one of the papers talks? After the deadline, loads of workers will see what’s being printed. The EuroGov make sneaking worth people’s while. That would give them a lot of extra time to decide what to do with me. And… it’s really
not
going to take them very long!”

“
No, I don’t think it will take them very long either,” he sighed. “I was all for getting you out on the Thursday night and having you safe before the headlines break. But everyone else thinks the headlines will be better if you’re still in there.
I
said, well, Margo’ll be in there when the headlines were
written
, but
they
think they’ll look better mounting a daring and generous rescue of the beleaguered heroine
after
she finds herself in peril.
I
said no one will believe they put together a plan to empty a Facility in one day after reading the headlines and realizing your danger, but
they
said…”