London Wild (99 page)

He didn’t really want to investigate further, but he had to see if Myajes was still in there. He couldn’t go back to this new Colonel only to report that he had turned around at the door.

What he saw beyond the door was enough to make even a hardened Doctor like him feel sick. Doctor Foster and every one of his staff were lying about the laboratory
, killed by what appeared to be the same weapon that had reduced Guardsman Hillington to a pile of dust. Two of the doctors had been trying to hide behind desks when the killer had struck. Doctor Sutcliff seemed to be missing the top two-thirds or so of her head, and what remained of her corpse had been stripped to its underwear, while Doctor Murray-Phillips was lying face down with a hole through the center of his chest as if shot at close range. There was no sign of Doctor Foster or Doctor Jones, but there were two more piles of dust lying about the room, and they had been scattered about as if someone had walked through them, possibly more than once.

Indeed
, many of the desks had been knocked over, and pieces of them were missing. There were computer monitors on the floor smashed into many pieces, documents and glass everywhere. The place looked as if a cyclone had hit it.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to believe what had happened as he made his way over to the panel that controlled the cell’s camera. He was pretty sure of what he would see when he flicked the switch, but did so anyway. There was no feeling of surprise when he saw that the cell was empty.

He half sat, half collapsed in a nearby chair and pondered his situation; he ought to contact the authorities. Warn them that there were cats loose on Mars and that they were very dangerous. He wished the new Colonel had given him a number to call him back on because he should probably report this as soon as possible. He had a nasty feeling he might miss that three o’clock appointment. 
At least Doctor Foster had gotten the address of the Matriarch’s house first
, he thought to himself.

Back To Earth

It was a lovely house
, a beautiful pink painted bungalow, right on the bend in the middle of millionaire’s row. Everything about the house had been designed to make it look normal whilst trying to hide anything that actually happened there. There was no real gate to block passage into the driveway, but an eight foot hedge surrounded the border of the rest of the front of the property, and a camera set back a little from the front of the driveway kept a constant eye on any and all traffic that crossed the threshold.

Myajes knew that there were also a number of other cameras located around the grounds. They were carefully positioned to cover every square inch of the property without making it look as if the owners of the house were paranoid. Most of the houses along this stretch of the road had cameras
, and if anything this house actually had fewer than many of the neighbors.

Every window had bars protecting them from any outside incursion as well as electronic intruder force fields that would give a nasty shock to anyone
who tried to gain ingress that way. Protection of this sort wasn’t really needed for what was effectively the headquarters of the entire Herbaht race, but they made the house look more like the ones next to it, and it stopped passersby wondering why the house had nothing to protect it from possible Herbaht assault.

The rest of the grounds were pretty normal
. The back garden was well landscaped and very well looked after, with tall prickly hedges protecting the land as well as the strategically placed cameras. There was also a line of topiary hedges cut into various farmland creatures: a duck, a sheep, a chicken, and so on, and these lined the edge of the lawn nearest the house, separated from the house by no more than a narrow concrete path. Also at the very bottom of the garden, as far as it could be from the house, was a lovely arbor, with concrete slabs looking like stepping stones leading to it across the lawn from the house. All this work and this beauty had been the work of his brother, Jamick.

Most of the Matriarch’s bodyguards also had secondary jobs about the house. They seemed to prefer siblings
, believing that they would work better as a cohesive group if the situation should become tenuous. Jamick, his brother, was the gardener and a very good one. Hamdrill, his half-sister, was the cook. And though she had no actual relation to him, Mickie was related to Hamdrill through her father. Mickie doubled as the nanny for the Matriarch’s youngest children. It had been a while since a nanny had actually been needed about the house, but the position was still maintained because who knew what the future might bring? Myajes himself had always acted as chauffeur and butler for the pair because that gave him the excuse to remain close to his wards.

Myajes had once been the best of the best
, the most capable of all four of the bodyguards, but after spending a week or so in various cells drugged up to his eyeballs, and on top of that, force fed a drug that was intended to make him docile, he was no longer so sure that he had the edge.

He watched the house from a distance, pretty sure that it was empty. The cameras that tended to make regular sweeps of the area seemed now to be fixed in position
, and there was no sign at all of any other activity anywhere on the grounds. His brother was always out and about on the grounds when the family was home. Another sign that no one was home was that the car which usually sat in the driveway just beyond the entrance to the grounds—the car that he himself had spent many a weekend getting washed—was nowhere to be seen.

Myajes
had had a fair number of things he had wanted to report to the Matriarch before he tried again to rescue Lara from the Cattery
.
He wasn’t as skeptical as February had been about the Eschiff, or throwbacks, as the Matriarch had often referred to them. And he wanted to report their involvement in the latest developments of their relationship with the herd. He also wanted to hand over the frame thing and perhaps even be assured by her that it wasn’t really of Eschiff manufacture after all.

Another thing he wanted to do, although it shouldn’t be too hard if he was willing to stay in one place for a few minutes, was to find a piece of bare wall out of possible sight of anyone so he could set the gateway back up and thus give both February and Kitty a way home. He had waited two hours before leaving the laboratory and even then had done so reluctantly, but he had known that it would only be a matter of
time before someone was missed and the bodies were discovered, and it would be better for all concerned if he wasn’t near when they did. 

Before he left the laboratory
, he had put the supposed Eschiff creature into the room beyond the gateway before dismantling the frame. It would be easier to transport that way than trying to walk through the corridors of Mars with her over his shoulder, and he felt that it too was proof of one kind or another.

Although the house itself looked quite empty, the road just beyond the grounds looked a lot busier than
it ever had in his memory. There was an old van parked across the street from the main entrance that looked totally out of place on this road. Its windows had actually been boarded up and it looked as if it had been abandoned, but it was a bit of a coincidence that it should be abandoned exactly where it was. There were workmen in the street; supposedly they were replacing a pipeline, but in the two hours that Myajes had been watching them, they had taken no more than three shovelfuls of earth out of the hole, and then only when they thought someone was watching them. There was also a couple out walking their dog. They had passed the house with a poodle about an hour and a half ago and then come back approximately an hour later. It was possible they were a genuine couple, but somehow he doubted it. If he had the time he might watch to see if they passed the house again, perhaps with a different dog. And there were probably others around that he hadn’t noticed yet. For example, there was a dirt track behind the hedges that surrounded the back garden, and there would almost have to be someone watching that part of the house.

One thing Myajes was sure about was that whoever was watching the house, it wasn’t the Elite Guard. The Elite would probably have done a better job of disguising their intent. Instead of an old van that was supposed to look abandoned, they would have used something more in keeping with the ambience of the area and something that looked less like a surveillance vehicle. A convertible with the top down sprang to mind. The observer could watch through a specially crafted hole in either the front or rear storage areas, uncomfortable but very discreet.

If they weren’t the Elite, then the Guard was obviously stretched beyond their current capability and they had had to get others in to watch the house for them. Since capturing the Matriarch was virtually the holy grail of the Elite Guard
,
it pointed even more to the fact that no one was home.

Myajes sat back in his car and started the engine. It would do him no good moping around here all day. He still had to find a way to rescue Lara
, though admittedly, he had been out of the picture for so long it would be a miracle if she was even still alive.

He looked at the folded frame sitting on the passenger seat beside him. He wasn’t about to walk into the Cattery with that
; he had gone through a lot to get it, and it might be vital in the war they might now be fighting on two fronts. It would be best if he gave it to someone trustworthy in the hope that it would find its way into the Matriarch’s hands. He decided to visit the nearest regional headquarters. There he might even be lucky enough to find out where the Matriarch had gone. If nothing else, he could leave the frame and the holographic picture with the leader, and she could pass it on to the Matriarch when the opportunity arose.

To Myajes’ mind, Lara’s life was on the line
, and it was possible that every second he delayed made it even less likely that he would find her alive, but after his last experience in the Cattery no one could blame him for wanting to delay his next attempt at a rescue. Besides, he was also hoping for a place to rest up a bit first, a place to sleep a little and time to flush his system of the drugs that had been pumped into him.

The nearest headquarters to the house in Fobbing was just a few short miles up a shallow hill to Basildon
, and it took him no more than ten minutes in fairly light traffic to make it. Indeed, it was surprising just how little traffic there was in the area and how the closer to London he got, the less traffic there seemed to be, which was the opposite of how he remembered it from as recently as two weeks ago.

The headquarters was a mess. It looked as if several bombs had hit it
, and the walls were strewn with many blackened laser burns. The building seemed to be pretty much in one piece, but a few chunks of debris had been knocked out of the walls and were lying about here and there.

There were a few soldiers milling about the place
, including what appeared to be two of the Elite Guard. There was also a robotic reporter complete with a built-in camera recording everything for posterity. Three N’s were emblazoned on the robot’s camera, telling Myajes the network that was recording this event.

A robot reporter
, though… Obviously what had happened here wasn’t even being considered important enough for the network to have sent someone of flesh and blood. And that meant that of every coup the army had had against his people recently, this had to be quite a minor one by comparison.

Myajes decided not to hang around. If the Elite noticed him watching what they were doing
, he might find himself in that cell again before he even knew it. There were a couple of friends who lived nearby; perhaps he could visit one of them and find out what had happened. It was even possible that he might yet uncover the new location of the Matriarch, although his hopes in this area were fast evaporating. For all he knew, the Matriarch and her husband were already guests of the authorities. It was unlikely, since they were still watching the house, but nevertheless it was something to think about. He might have to rescue not just Lara but also both her parents.

Gramm Stanic was the nearest that he knew of. A member of the regional headquarters he had just left
, he lived no further than two or three streets from the place on a road called ‘Sparrows Hearne.’ He stopped the car just across the street and looked at the mess that awaited him. The glass windows of the house had been broken, the bars that had protected them were torn from their mountings, and the door had been smashed in. There was no sign of a struggle, no rubble or laser burns, and Myajes hoped that Gramm hadn’t been in when this had happened.

The next house he knew of belonged to Dol and Marita Lear
. They were close friends of the Matriarch and her husband and lived a little further away in Pitsea. Their house was also empty, although by the look of it, whatever had driven them out of their house hadn’t been the armed forces.

Myajes drove on
, unsure what to make of the situation. The armed forces seemed to be striking everywhere, but it also seemed that his people had been ready and in most cases had moved out already before the soldiers had arrived. The worst thing he could imagine that might have happened to Dol and Marita was that they had been visiting the headquarters when it had been attacked, but neither of them were the sort that frequented there that often, and the likelihood of either being there at just that moment seemed somehow unlikely. It was more likely that whatever had driven the Matriarch and Patriarch from their home was the same thing that had driven Dol and Marita out too, and hopefully even Gramm.