Regeneration (30 page)

Or early.

It was cold beneath the water, and none too bright, but Rhys had night vision to go with his strength and his speed, and although his
ability to withstand the chill was nothing compared to a gillung's, it was far superior to any norm's. Besides, he was working too hard, too fast, with too great a sense of impending doom, to notice. There was a metronome in his head counting down the seconds, the minutes, from Gabriel's shouted warning. There was no time for the cold, the burning in his lungs, the ache in his arms, and the stinging in his fingers; still less for the thoughts of Callan that kept trying to intrude against the ticking of that clock. It was not until his hands cramped up on the sixth device that he realized he was freezing, becoming distracted, and losing dexterity. That, along with the rapidly dwindling oxygen levels in his blood, would slow him, making him lose focus, even start to panic if he was not careful. He let go of the slippery disk and slowly and methodically clenched and unclenched his fingers before trying again. If he didn't get it on the next go, he would have to lose precious seconds surfacing for a breath before he could make another attempt.

There it was: the tiniest movement, the slimmest of gaps. He shoved the tips of his fingers beneath the mechanism, wincing at the pinch to his already sore skin, and twisted. He felt more than saw the water flood in behind the seal and break it; there was a thrum in his hands as the weak circuit that had formed between the device and the cell-thin layers of quantum battery buried deep in the biopolymer shorted out. He'd had a belated presentiment of folly with the first one, imagining himself electrocuted underwater by a massive discharge when the detonator pulled free, but it was only a small spark; whatever the device was doing was internal to the cells, disrupting them and breaking down the subtle tensions that held huge energies in stasis. He knew enough about the physics of quantum storage to have been able to imagine, as he slowly and painfully twisted one after the other off the energy-rich walls of the Thames Tidal Power building, how the devices were doing what they were doing.

He let the thing fall and kicked for the surface, glancing right and left for any glimpse of Pilan, who was working with some great angled tool that Rhys thought must've been used to maneuver parts of the estuary turbines into position. Pilan was at heart a
maker,
a
man who liked to build things with his own hands; he had started as a field engineer in the Gempro underwater construction business, and it had been he who had first seen how to integrate the delicate bioelectrics of quantum-energy storage into the tough layered polymers and resin-stone that could keep them stable, accessible, and rechargeable. He had jury-rigged a system to power the first free gillung encampment, and gathered a team of refugee technicians to help refine and perfect it as the years went by. Nothing, not even the demands of a growing company, had ever made him lose sight of the importance of getting down to work with everyone else, of leading by example.

Rhys breached without spotting or sensing Pilan, and gulped air. Gabriel was still on the quay, scanning the water anxiously, and now he ran to lean over the nearest rail.

“I've done six,” Rhys called up to him. “Pilan?”

“I think he's somewhere there,” Gabriel shouted back, pointing. “He's not coming up as often as you. Maybe four?”

Rhys stroked for the spot, ignoring the pain in his shoulders, and dived deep. He found Pilan grappling with one of the devices that had been tucked under the curving surface at an awkward angle. His lever kept slipping. Rhys swam up and helped muscle it into position, then braced his back in the angle between the wall and the metal bar. They heaved, and another detonator went skittering down. Pilan showed five webbed fingers and pointed at himself, then at Rhys. Rhys showed him six, and pointed up.

They surfaced together. “One to go!” Pilan shouted up at Gabriel as Rhys caught his breath and tried to still his shivering. “Just have to find it.”

Gabriel gave them a thumbs-up and spoke into his earset. The countdown in Rhys's head told him they had a little over two minutes left.
Plenty of time,
he thought, but when they found the last detonator he knew that he was wrong: it was in a cramped corner at the deepest part of the building, stuck to the underside barely a foot above the silty bottom. The diver who'd placed it there must have pulled himself along headfirst and then extended his arm fully. There was no room for them both, and anyway, Rhys's stiffening hands could
get no purchase. He kicked free, watched for a few seconds as Pilan squirmed under and tried to snag it with his lever, then tapped him and pointed up.

“We can't,” Rhys gasped as they broke the surface, “not in the time we have. But it's the last one and it's furthest away from where there are any people.” He swiveled in the water and saw Gabriel, still on the quay, still refusing to leave, leaning over the rail and waiting for the signal that would tell him they were all safe. The timer in his head said less than a hundred seconds. “Leave it, Pilan. Let's get out of here.” His teeth were chattering now, and he could barely feel his hands or feet.

“I can reach it,” the Thames Tidal boss said, “and I'll be damned if I'll let them destroy this place. All our work is here, everything we've built. But you need to get out of the water.” He grabbed Rhys and kicked for the ladder. He shoved Rhys up it, and Gabriel reached down and helped drag him onto the quay.

“I need a little more time!” Pilan called up. “Don't wait for me—you have to get Rhys out of here—he's hypothermic.”

“But—” Gabriel shouted back.

Pilan bellowed, “Go!” and disappeared.

Rhys dragged himself to his feet, and as Gabriel helped him pull on his discarded coat and shoes, he felt his supercharged circulation start to bring tingling, painful life back into his fingers and toes.

“He's mad,” he said to Gabriel. “It's in a terrible position; it's going to take too much time—” He broke off, staring along the quay at a figure that had appeared at one of the side passages that led to safety. Instead of heeding the alarms or the shouts of police to come back, he was running
toward
them: a figure with flaming red hair, dressed in a flamboyant, royal-blue coat.

Rhys's heart lurched.

Beside him, Gabriel saw, or maybe just felt the surge of panic, and said, “What?”

“Callan,” Rhys gasped. “What the
hell
is he—?” and moved to go to him, then looked back at Gabriel, standing there on the quay, helplessly waiting for Pilan to surface again, and made a decision.

He reached around Gabriel's back and grabbed his upper arm on the far side, clamping both of the young man's arms against his torso so that he could not hit out with them, and began to jog toward Callan, dragging Gabriel along. He tried to pull away, stumbling, but Rhys was many times stronger and he formed the thought clearly so that Gabriel would know it too.

“I am going and I am not leaving you, so either I carry you or you run,” he said aloud, through gritted teeth; they were already rapidly leaving the Thames Tidal quayside behind. Rhys waved Callan back with his free arm:
Go back, go back, don't come any closer.

“There's nothing we can do to help Pilan, do you understand?”

He's my friend too, and he's not doing this so we can risk our lives just to keep him company,
he thought at Gabriel.
He's made his choice: we have to respect that.

Gabriel cried out, a little gasp of anguish, and then he stopped resisting, got his feet under him and started to move in earnest. Rhys shifted his grip to Gabriel's elbow and ran as fast as he could without pulling him off his feet. He heard him mumbling into his earset as they went.

“Aunt Aryel,” he was saying, almost crying, “time to go. Get down somewhere safe.”

If there was a reply, Rhys did not hear it. They reached Callan, who had turned but kept looking back over his shoulder as though afraid to let them out of his sight. Rhys grabbed his husband with his other hand and dragged them along on either side as he ran, desperately aware that if he missed his footing, or if anyone tripped, they would spin off at high speed and most likely be injured. It was a risk he had to take. The metronome in his head had ticked down to the target point and past it; now it was plus ten seconds, plus fifteen, plus twenty.

They were at the far end of the basin now and swerving off the quay into a side road. At the head of it he could see massed ranks of police and ambulances and fire vehicles, and the news crew with their vidcam pointed toward them; he heard the sounds of a frightened mob and the shouts of officers shepherding them back. It looked as
though many of the evacuees were still no more than a hundred yards away from the quayside.

He just had time to think,
Holy shit, they're way too close—if we hadn't cleared so many they'd have been WAY too close . . .

Then the explosion slammed into them, lifted them off their feet, and threw them toward the retreating crowd.

Even though the investigation quickly established that development of the quantum-battery disruptors had begun even before work on the toxin-producing algae—that Moira Charles had, in fact, set out to buy or steal the secrets of quantum storage years before—Mikal Varsi could not shake the suffocating feeling that it was somehow all his fault.

“If I hadn't told Mitford to get stuffed,” he said, over and over again, “if I'd gone along with his plan—or pretended to . . . If he'd still believed he could win by undermining the company . . .”

“He was never just counting on that,” Sharon and Aryel told him, over and over again. “He was always going to do this. He started by sowing doubts about TTP's competence and safety record—that's what the turbine sabotage and the toxin attacks were all about. They didn't expect us to uncover the truth, at least not as quickly as we did, and Kaboom was there to keep talking up the lie. Then one day the famous Thames Tidal building would just blow up, taking most of the members and directors with it, and it would look like everything they'd been warning about all along had come to pass. They'd already bought off or figured they could bully whoever
was left in control of the company; it would have been a great coup for Bankside, and therefore Standard—and, let's not forget, the Traditional Democrats: Mitford was really multitasking here. You didn't start this, Mik, and you couldn't have stopped it.”

“I could have stopped it happening
then
. If I hadn't flipped Mitford off, he wouldn't have moved so soon . . .”

“If it hadn't happened then,” Aryel pointed out, “we wouldn't have found out about it in time to save as many lives and as much of Sinkat as we did. If Moira Charles hadn't pulled the trigger before she found out that Kaboom was compromised, Mitford's plan would have worked and many,
many
more people would have died.” She'd squeezed Mikal's big, increasingly stiff, double-thumbed hands in her own small strong ones. “I know that doesn't make the one we lost any easier to bear, Mik. But if Pilan were here, he'd tell you the same thing. You know he would.”

And he did know. He knew, but he could not be convinced.

Of Pilan's body there was no trace. After days of painstaking searches through the wreckage of the iconic headquarters of Thames Tidal Power and the rest of Sinkat Basin, Sharon was forced to tell a grief-stricken Lapsa that there was nothing left to commit to the deep but memories. And so they had done that, this morning; they had gone down to the jetty at Riveredge Village at the head of a parade of mourners and boarded one of a great flotilla of boats heading out into the estuary. It was the first time Eve had been back to the river since her ordeal ten days earlier, and she held tight to Bal's and Gaela's hands as they approached the quayside, peering around for any sign of the Blond Lady.

“She said I didn't know her, Mama,” she reported to Gaela, “and that's true, I guess, 'cept I felt like I
did
know her, a little. She kind of reminded me of somebody.”

“Who, sweetheart?”

“I don't
know
who.” She'd pushed away the blond curls tumbling over her forehead, even more tangled than usual now that she had the excuse of a bandaged wrist. “At first I thought it was Aunty Aryel, 'cause the bad people had to stop and listen to her; they couldn't just do what they wanted and they were sort of afraid. But then Aunty
Aryel actually
came,
and I thought no, she's really different. It's somebody else.” A massive shrug. “But I don't know
who
.”

“Maybe you'll work it out one day, sweetie. But there's no rush.”

They had worried that the child would find the quayside embarkation too traumatic, until Gabriel, his own bruises still purpling his face and arms and hip, talked to her for a while and then told them she was fine, that she would be fine.

“She was scared, and she's still a bit on edge, but she's not fragile,” he'd said quietly. “And I think it's important for her to understand that it wasn't just about her. That something really, really terrible did happen.”

The pall of it hung over all of them as the black-bannered boats proceeded down the Thames. It was an unseasonably warm day; the breeze chased small, fluffy clouds across a crystal-blue sky and sent little wavelets skipping merrily as though in defiance of their grief. Aryel flew for most of the way, matching the slow pace of the boats. When the banks fell away on either side as the procession entered the estuary, she dropped down to join Eli on the foredeck of a barge and they stood there with Rhys and Callan. Callan's left arm was in a sling and his right was tightly clasped by Rhys. The young genmed physician was the only one of the trio caught in the explosion's shockwave to appear unscathed, but Mikal suspected he was just as scarred by doubt about whether he could have moved faster, tried harder, whether there were things he might have done differently.

From where he stood in the stern with Sharon and their boys, and Bal, Gaela, and Eve, Mikal could once more hear Aryel's mantra for these dreadful days, this time floating back from the bow: “It wasn't your fault. There was nothing more any of us could have done.” He looked ahead to the lead boat, where Gabriel was traveling with Lapsa, Agwé, and most of the surviving Thames Tidal team, and thought it might take the boy longer to believe than any of the rest of them, for the only one of his colleagues not there to mourn Pilan's passing was the source of the purloined secrets of quantum storage that had made the disruptors possible; the turncoat who had traded his people's lives for the wealth and power their deaths would have
brought him; the traitor now locked up and awaiting the pleasure of the courts.

Qiyem.

Agwé had guessed it, knowing that the destruction of the facility and its people would profit no one if the knowledge of how to manufacture and manage the quantum batteries died with them, and wondering how the businesspeople they'd foiled on the Riveredge jetty could possibly have gotten that information. She'd recalled Qiyem's strange insistence that she leave early that day, and as she and Lapsa evacuated the lower stories she'd confirmed that Qiyem had departed without explanation shortly after talking to her. The traces of his perfidy were now so clear that Gabriel felt a fool for having assumed a more reasonable explanation for why Qiyem was never,
ever
seen without his cranial band, despite never apparently using it.

“People think things they're ashamed of, they have fantasies they don't want anyone else to know about, they remember things they wish they hadn't done,” he'd said miserably from his hospital bed when Mikal had told him that Qiyem had been picked up trying to leave the city. “I knew he was hiding something, but I thought it was that. I thought it was that.”

“It's not your fault,” Mikal had told him. “He fooled everyone. You couldn't have known.” He felt like an actor in a bad play, saying his appointed lines in the endless round of useless consolation, aware that Gabriel was no more likely to consider himself blameless than he himself was. “You couldn't have known,” is what they told each other, and “I should have known,” is what they told themselves.

The streams were less concerned with the self-recriminations of those who had lost a friend than with unpicking the hard facts of precisely who had known or done precisely what to whom in the dizzying confluence of business and politics. Moira Charles had without doubt been at the heart of it, drawing on her network of contacts to activate various parts of the plan: Conrad Fischer for public relations, Patrick Crawford for the channeling of payments, various others for microflora modification, the engineering of quantum bioelectrics, and other technical requirements. The mystery submersible waiting out in the estuary to spirit away the fleeing terrorists, their party
belatedly doubled by last-minute instructions to collect Charles and her party from the Riveredge Village jetty, added a nicely retro flavor of drama and derring-do.

But, more serious minds inquired, just how far up did the conspiracy go?

Standard and Bankside denied all knowledge, as did Abraham Mitford. Arguments raged about the likelihood of the former, but the latter's protestations were dismissed out of hand; it beggared belief that so much of Mitford's money could have been siphoned into funding the plot without him being aware of it, and the relationship between Mitford and Charles was well known. On top of that, Councillor Mikal Varsi had made a statement to the police the day before the explosion, detailing threats Mitford had made against Thames Tidal.

The big question, the
huge
question, the question on which it appeared an election might hang, was whether Mitford's strategy had been sanctioned by anyone in his party. They denied it all, of course, and appeared perplexed to find themselves largely disbelieved.

One of the very rare moments of clear-eyed perspective came courtesy of Zavcka Klist, who was profoundly unimpressed with her former corporate bedfellows. “You don't eliminate the brains behind an operation that you want to maintain,” she observed to Eli, who kept his next appointment with her a few days after the disaster. She was once more ensconced in her luxurious apartment, but her tracker's proximity alarms were now set to trigger alerts at police stations as well as with Offender Management monitoring teams. “You
induce
them—take the business over, certainly, but in a way that keeps the key people in post and working hard. This appears to have been a strategy to steal a single clutch of golden eggs and slaughter the goose that laid them.” She'd shaken her head in irritation. “Stupid and wasteful. I thought Abraham Mitford had more sense.”

Eli repeated the story now, several hours after the memorial ceremony out in the estuary, where the boats had clustered in the lee of one of the battery banks Pilan had lived to see built. The words had been said and the tears had been cried and the boats had returned up the river. Gabriel stopped off with Agwé and Lapsa, still settling into their new quarters in Limedog, and Rhys took a weary and
aching Callan home; Mikal, Sharon, Aryel, and Eli had come back to the apartment above the café and sat there now with Gaela and Bal, listening to the sounds of the children playing in the garden below which came drifting in through an open window.

“I do not want to be agreeing with Zavcka Klist,” Mikal declared from his seat deep in an old and frighteningly comfortable armchair. “I've had to do a lot of unpleasant things in my life, but I'm struggling with that one.”

“I'm tempted to say it's not her fault that she's right,” Eli replied. “I won't,” he added, as they all looked at him.

“It's instructive,” Aryel murmured, “to know what Zavcka's strategy would have been. We were lucky, in the end, that she wasn't behind this.”

“I suppose,” said Sharon. “She's cold, that one. Did she even pretend to regret that Pilan lost his life, while she was busy critiquing Mitford's tactics?”

“She's not as cold as she was,” Eli told them. “She wanted to know if Eve knew the man who died, if he'd been a friend whose death would affect her. I told her that yes, he'd been a friend of the family and her brother's boss, and his death was being felt very keenly. There didn't seem any point pretending otherwise.”

He hesitated for a long time, but Mikal knew his friend well and knew that he wasn't done. He sat up, expectant, as Eli pulled a small, flat package wrapped in delicate, pale gold paper out of the slide-pocket where it must have rested next to his tablet. He held it carefully, as if he was not sure how to continue.

Aryel put an encouraging hand on his knee.

“She said she was sorry, then,” Eli said. “And she gave me something.”

They had been in her book-lined study once more, sipping the exquisite coffee Marcus had served and talking, although the subject this time was current events rather than history. Eli had hoped for this, despite knowing that questions about Eve would inevitably be part of the price. He was braced for a diatribe that did not come,
although he decided later that Zavcka was most likely saving it up for Aryel.

Instead, she had looked at him over the rim of her cup: quiet, reflective. “So,” she said, “you're Uncle Eli.”

“I . . .” She would have heard and seen, there on the riverwalk. She had heard and seen Eve with all of them. “Yes, I'm Uncle Eli.”

She did not look angry, or sad, or happy. She was just waiting, so he added, “I don't think I'm her favorite, if it makes you feel any better.”

She waved that away as a matter of no moment, put her cup down, and said without rancor, “No, I would guess that's most likely Uncle Mikal, although I think she's very fond of you too. And Rhys of course, and Callan.”

He had said nothing, just watched her.

“And her Aunts Sharon and Aryel,” she had murmured, and there, finally, was a touch of the bitterness he'd been expecting, along with something else: the lingering amazement of someone who has witnessed a marvel and was still coming to terms with it. “And is it Aunty Gwen as well?”

“When she's around, which isn't that often.”

“I see,” she said, and asked about Pilan, and he told her.

“So he wasn't one of the uncles. A friend, but not . . . one of the family.”

“No. I mean,” Eli said, thinking he had to explain, thinking too that even now he must be careful not to explain too much, “she knows we're not her biological family.”

“That hardly matters, Dr. Walker, as I think you understand very well.” Zavcka got up and walked over to the books, arms folded as they had been the first time he'd seen her stand there, although the attitude was different now: less calculated, less concerned with his presence. Her head was bowed in contemplation of something resting on the shelf. Then she picked it up in a rustle of wheat-colored tissue paper and came back to stand next to him.