London Wild (41 page)

‘Wild cats are notorious for despising the comfortable life that the domesticated ones have,’ Maureen claimed
. ‘Stories of hunters killing a pet out of hand while they were searching for prey used to permeate the headlines.’

‘They hardly have it cushy anymore,’ George almost snapped, ‘but you could be right. I doubt she’ll find many friends out there. Chances are she died that first night.’ 

Stanley nodded in sad agreement. ‘Your intentions were good, but we probably can’t do anything for her anymore.’

‘What’s worse is
that even if she did make it to Sou’nd and did make friends among her own kind,’ Maureen offered, ‘well, I’m afraid Slim Dorris has plans for that town tomorrow.’

‘I know,’ said George. If his brother and his brother’s wife had intended to cheer him up
, they weren’t doing a very good job. ‘I saw them.’

‘Well, nevertheless,’ Stanley said, perhaps just a little coldly
(though unintentionally so), ‘in three days’ time, when they check and find out you haven’t handed in your pet, you’re going to be in trouble. We can still put you up in our new home. You can help us move in. It’s always possible that the authorities won’t pursue you there because you’re human.’

‘I could use a new home,’ George agreed
, continuing, ‘since I lost my job last month I’ve been having financial trouble. I have enough for this month’s mortgage payment and possibly enough for next month’s, but I’ve had to live frugally to ensure that second payment, and I’m still not sure I’ll have enough left when it’s time for it. It would be a shame to just leave the house just like that, but since I suspect that in three or four days’ time I’m going to be finding myself in prison otherwise, maybe it’s just as well. When the next payment isn’t made, the mortgage company will probably claim the house. It would be nice to sell it, of course, but three days isn’t going to be long enough. I don’t know; perhaps I can hire someone to do it for me.’

‘And three days are all you have until you are in default with Kitty and they come to find you,’ Stanley agreed. ‘It is an awful waste, but what can you do?’

‘We’ll get you to Mars and hope they don’t pursue you there,’ Maureen added.

‘When did you intend to leave?
’ George asked. ‘When are your return tickets for?’

‘The tickets are open
-ended; we can return anytime in the next week, by which time I need to be back at work anyway. Tickets are courtesy of the Mars Base construction company, an offshoot company of the one I was working for on the moon. It gives up to four people free passage.’

‘A nice coincidence,’ George suggested.

‘Not really,’ Stanley replied with a smile and a sip from his drink. ‘I requested that the ticket cover four people, as I thought you and Kitty might be returning with me.’

George nodded. He leaned back in the chair again and had to steady it before it tipped back too far. He hated that, but it could be a great advantage when watching holomovies.

Stanley continued, ‘We had planned to spend two to three days here, see a few sights and visit some old friends. With the weather the way it is, I’m no longer so sure about seeing the sights, but I’d still like to go and say hi to a few people. However, if you feel you want to get away sooner than that, we could even leave tomorrow.’

‘Visiting your friends with the cats converging on London might be a dangerous thing to do
; perhaps we should leave sooner. But I have three days until the authorities will return to arrest me. That’s three days during which Kitty, if she is still alive, might try and contact me. If she does I can tell her of the plan, and maybe we will be able to take her with us after all. It’s not much of a chance, I know. But I’d like to give her that time, if it’s all right.’

‘Okay,’ Stanley offered. ‘We can leave in the morning, three days from now, unless we hear from Kitty before then. Does that sound ok?’

‘I should probably use the time to pack,’ George replied. ‘How much weight am I going to be allowed? I suppose I’d better leave most of the furniture behind. Are the rooms furnished?’

‘We expect it to be furnished, but not
with a lot of furniture,’ Stanley told him. ‘We can probably arrange for furniture to be sent separately, but I don’t think we are going to have enough room for you to move your entire house.’

‘You should choose that which you cannot live without and get the rest put into storage. Perhaps you’ll be in a position to get it back in the future
,’ Maureen offered.

George nodded slowly
. ‘The holoviewa can stay; the newspaper can stay. You’ll have these up there, I’ve no doubt. There are probably a lot of things like that that can stay or at least not hurry to get delivered, but there are a few things I couldn’t bear to be without.’

‘Well,’ Stanley told him, ‘you’re going to have a whole room to yourself. It won’t be a very big room. I haven’t seen the dimensions of it, but I’m told two teenage or younger children or one older child will fit comfortably in each of the extra rooms.’

It sounded a little cramped to George, but circumstances seemed to be calling the shots at the moment. ‘I can’t wait to see it,’ he replied.

A Night Out

With the moon little more than a tiny crescent
, the only light seemed to come from a pair of very old-looking street lamps below the rooftop on which Sult was currently standing. The nearer of the two lamps hummed intermittently in a way that suggested it needed maintenance. Neither of them seemed to be producing anything like the floodlit effect of the modern street lamps that helped to deter cats from attacking those in their radiance.

Sult breathed out and watched the cloud of steam that his hot breath caused as it hit the cold night air slowly dissipate into nothing. The wind blew his jacket a little and seemed to be trying to distract him from his appointed task.

It was a cold and breezy night, yet Sult didn’t feel the cold and the wind was little more than an annoyance. There didn’t seem to be the usual chill factor that the wind normally brought with it. Perhaps that was just an anomaly, but there were others: the lamps, for one, were a few hundred years old and should have been replaced long ago, and then there was the existence of snow. The modern under-road heating was designed to stop it from settling, but this place had no under-road heating and tonight the snow was everywhere. Even as he kept his eyes on the part of the road that was illuminated by the lamps, his vision was partially obscured by the still falling snow.

Sult didn’t care about the snow. It was a minor inconvenience. All that worried him was what happened in the street below. This rooftop had a commanding view of that street. The building has once been the top of a multi-storey car park
. As such, it had the only flat roof in the area, apart from a hovercopter pad on top of the fifteen-storey building about half a mile away which he hadn’t been able to find a way onto. It was probably too high for his purposes anyway. The multi-storey was an obvious place to use as a lookout, and his enemy would know that. In fact, this building had a commanding view of four different streets, but you had to move to different sides of the roof to see them all properly. The two roads visible from Sult’s position had rows of shops lining them. The one Sult was interested in was quite wide, wide enough for a road to bisect its center, but if such a road ever did exist it had long since been paved over. The other did have a road, but it stopped before it met the first road. Of the other two streets, one seemed to be the back of yet a third row of shops, while the fourth led north via a road with a wall on the near side and a few houses on the other towards a distant dual carriageway. Coincidentally, it also led around to the fronts of that third row of shops. Beyond the carriageway stood the building with the hovercopter pad on its roof, protected by nothing more than a low and heavily battered steel fence that would have been easy to hop over, had he been so inclined.  Back in its heyday this had evidently been some sort of shopping center.—an outdoors mall with the main road paved over for pedestrian access, but with a few offshoot roads also lined with shops and still accessible by road traffic. Sult couldn’t see all of the offshoot roads from his position on the multi-storey, but he knew of their existence from previous visits. He knew that if he were to go far enough to the south along that main paved street, he would reach a traditional enclosed mall complete with parking facilities for the mall’s clients. It was long deserted now, like every other shop in this area. Heading even further south from there would take you to the sea front and what had once been the longest pleasure pier in the world.

‘Bang, you’re dead
,’ came a voice from behind him. Sult turned round to the figure moving quietly through the snow behind him. ‘Any sign of them?’

Sult relaxed his grip on his laser rifle, although if it had been the enemy behind him it
was very unlikely he would only have said ‘Bang!’ ‘Nothing much. I saw one of them a few minutes ago moving between a couple of shop fronts. He or she ducked into the doorway of that big shop by that road, just out of range of the light from that second lamp. I sort of lost sight of him soon after, but there’s virtually no way the figure could have moved without my seeing it. You have the glasses.’

Sult’s partner in this endeavor was one Fredrick Hughes. He was off-duty for the day from the
Elite Guard, where he held the modest rank of Guardsman. He was five foot nine, fairly thin with thick black hair, and he looked very fit. His head kept moving, studying everything around himself in a way that suggested that nothing could get past without him noticing it. In short, he was very well trained, but then, only the most capable entered into the ranks of the Elite. He moved to the edge of the rooftop next to Sult and peered into the area that Sult had indicated. As an aid to his vision, he pulled out a small pair of infrared binoculars and used them to study first the doorway Sult had pointed out and then all the other shop doorways that were in easy reach of the first. ‘I see nothing down there; he must’ve moved while you were watching.’

Sult shrugged his shoulders
. ‘So I’m out of practice. It’s been a while since we were last in Sou’nd. It’s a shame, though; I was hoping he might lead us to the others.’

Fredrick stood up again and looked around
, saying, ‘They’ll probably guess we’re up here. We should move.’

Sult took one last look down at the street below
, looking for any sign of his quarry. There weren’t even footprints in the snow. Then he climbed to his feet. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

The sound of a weapon powering up near the central elevators was followed within a moment by his friend Fredrick Hughes getting the full force of the blast from a laser rifle in the chest. The blast was so violent that it threw him from the rooftop.

Sult reached for his weapon at the same time he dived for the soft, snow-covered ground. As he landed he guessed that he hadn’t made it; they had shot him. The world seemed to swivel awkwardly as one of the cats he had been hunting approached from the relative darkness of the rooftop elevators, his laser rifle still pointing at Sult. Two more emerged from the shadows behind the first. The hunter had become the hunted. At the same time the words ‘GAME OVER’ flashed in front of his eyes.

Sult removed the Interactive Reality helmet and gloves angrily. He knew they shouldn’t have set the game to its hardest setting; it really was a waste of money. He hadn’t even got
ten the chance to shoot; nor, he was sure, had Fredrick. He knew it was only a bit of fun, and it had gotten his adrenaline pumping, but in the end he felt they really hadn’t stood much of a chance. No one had yet beaten any of the Sou’nd scenarios at that level of difficulty. 

Although Fredrick had been hit no more than a second before
, Sult’s game was also over. When he left the IR booth, Sult saw that the other had already returned to his seat at their table. Despite the adrenaline rush that he too must have been experiencing, he looked quite relaxed as he sat there looking straight toward Sult and the booths.

‘Well, I enjoyed that,’ Fredrick told him as Sult rejoined him, ‘even if it was over a lot sooner than I expected. I didn’t think they could move that quietly, not on snow anyway.’

‘Computers tend to cheat,’ Sult replied simply. ‘One of the side-effects of the A.I., no doubt. After all, the computer has to know where you are at all times so it can give you a fair input of your surroundings and show you what you can see. But the computer also controls the baddies. Although the baddies aren’t supposed to know what the computer knows, it’s not difficult for the computer to tell itself things it’s not supposed to know.’

Fredrick nodded sagely and then said, ‘
Or it could just be that the multi-storey was the most obvious place to lookout from and we spent too long there. It’s not unreasonable to think that the computer might be programmed to send them there after a while because of its commanding view over the nearby streets.’

Sult gave his friend a toothy grin
and said, ‘Well, if you want to get technical, I suppose.’

Fredrick laughed
. ‘I think it’s my round; what would you like to drink?’

‘It is your round,’ Sult enthusiastically agreed before asking for a pint of his usual.

Fredrick inserted his card into a small slot in the top of the table, and a machine popped up between them.