Terminal World (74 page)

Quillon eased through the door and was about to swing it gingerly shut when there was a flash and a rattle of automatic gunfire, unbearably loud in the tunnel’s confines. Bullets clanged into the door from the other side, punching thumb-sized dents all the way through the metal.

‘Cutter! Shut the door!’ Meroka shouted back at him.

He heaved at it and the door hinged towards closure, but not before more bullets had rained into it. He heard shouting and hurried footsteps. Through the narrowing gap he saw bright-yellow lights and heard more gunfire, closer this time.

‘Guess you were right about that ambush!’ he called down to Meroka. ‘Remind me never to doubt another thing you say!’

‘Yeah. Now shut the fucking door!’

He tried turning the key. The lock moved partway then jammed, as if the door had not closed completely. He tried again but with no luck.

‘It’s stuck!’ he called. ‘I can’t turn the lock!’

‘I don’t need a sermon on it, Cutter!’

He tried one last time, but the key still would not rotate all the way. The door seemed tight in its frame; he could only guess that the gunfire had damaged the lock on the other side. There was nothing to be done about it now. He withdrew the key, then started down the slope, Nimcha only ten or so steps further on. The gunfire had stopped for now, but even though the door was closed he heard the voices growing nearer. He quickened his pace, using his free hand to steady himself against the wall.

‘How far down?’ he called.

‘Not far!’ Meroka shouted back.

He heard a scrabbling sound behind him, a hand on the door. A grunt and the sound of safety catches or magazines being clicked into place. The door hinged open, the yellow light spilling down the slope. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw men with lanterns, bigger and brighter than their own. One of the men shouldering a gun and aiming it down at him—

Quillon crouched. On an impulse he lobbed the lantern in the direction of the yellow glow, putting all his strength into the swing. The lantern smashed into something. He heard a cry and then a series of barking yelps, and he imagined burning oil spilling over one of the ambushers. Someone loosed a short burst of automatic fire down the sloping shaft, but without the lantern to guide them, Quillon was all but invisible. He took another few steps after his companions. With both arms now free he reached his right hand into his pocket and pulled out the pistol, released the safety and aimed the gun at the widening yellow glow. He fired. Someone screamed and there was another sharp burst of return fire. He felt something tap his left arm, like a gentle blow from a small hammer. Another tap followed, this time striking him below his left collarbone. Both blows packed an unfeasible amount of momentum. He lost his balance and crashed into the tunnel wall. The door opened fully and a squall of gunfire lashed his way. He crouched, fired off two more shots and resumed his descent. The men at the top were beginning to come down the shaft, but they appeared unwilling to follow him too closely. He had been using his left arm to steady himself as he descended the shaft, but the strength that he’d had a moment before wasn’t there now.

‘Cutter!’ Meroka yelled. ‘You still breathing?’

‘On my way,’ he said, and to his surprise the words came out in a pained grunt. He sounded like a wounded man. It was only then that he began to suspect he might have been shot. There was, now that he gave some attention to the matter, quite a bit of pain in both his arm and chest.

Miraculously, the shaft began to level out. He picked up his pace, conscious that the others were now some way ahead. He was moving in darkness now, the bobbing glow of Meroka’s lantern before him - she and the others were clearly almost running - and the brightening glow of his pursuers behind. Shots continued to ring out, but as the tunnel became horizontal, so the curve took him out of reach of the bullets. He broke into a hobbling, off-kilter run. Slowly he began to catch up with the others.

The tunnel widened. His footfalls grew more echoey, the walls around him receding beyond the range of Meroka’s lantern. He had the impression that they had entered an enormous vault, a cathedral-sized void in the black fabric of Spearpoint.

‘Where are we?’ he gasped, between ragged breaths.

‘Give me the keys,’ Meroka snapped. ‘You
did
take the keys out, didn’t you?’

‘Of course.’

He passed her the set, conscious that Tulwar’s men would not be long in arriving. Meroka handed her rifle to Kalis.

‘Anything comes through that door, you shoot it. It’s set for single-fire mode. You’ve got twenty rounds. When I shout, you follow me.’

‘Why don’t we follow you now?’ Quillon asked.

‘Because I need the lantern to find the door out of here, and the lantern’s the thing they’re going to be shooting at. Any other dickhead questions, while we’re at it?’

‘I’m good for the moment.’

Meroka sped off, her footsteps diminishing into the distance. Wherever they were, it was immense. His arm and chest were still hurting. He touched the arm wound with the back of his pistol hand and the hand came away sticky and warm. He aimed the pistol at the yellowing maw of the tunnel and waited, knowing there was nothing else to be done.

‘Go into the darkness,’ Kalis told her daughter. ‘We will find you.’

Nimcha hesitated, then scampered away.

‘I’m sorry,’ Quillon said. ‘This isn’t the way it was meant to happen.’

‘Was any of this your fault, Quillon?’

‘I don’t think so.’ He reconsidered. ‘Some of it, possibly. Not all of it.’

‘Did you try to do what you could for my daughter?’

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Then you need not apologise.’

He heard the jangle of keys, a lock being tested. The sound came from right next to him and a thousand leagues away. ‘It won’t open!’ Meroka called, and for the first time since leaving the Red Dragon Bathhouse he heard real fear in her voice. She had been in control until now, even when she knew that they were walking into an ambush. It was an ambush on her territory and that changed everything. It had been manageable.

This wasn’t.

‘Here they come,’ Quillon said.

They shot into the brightening yellow glow. The men spilled out into the vault, shadows and silhouettes impossible to distinguish. Kalis started firing and Quillon did likewise, until the pistol clicked and became just another useless chunk of metal. There were three men, then four, then five. He had hurt one of them with the lantern, possibly wounded another, but there were still too many of them. Shots began to come in their direction, drawn by the muzzle flash from Kalis’s rifle. Quillon flinched, and then the rifle was silent. Twenty shots. It wasn’t much.

‘You can stop now,’ a voice said. A man stepped forwards from the tunnel mouth. He carried one of the bright lanterns, a small pistol held loosely in his other hand, as if he had no expectation of using it. ‘It’s over. Just the formalities to attend to now.’

It was Kargas. Quillon said nothing, letting the man find him in the darkness. For a moment they faced each other, Kargas inspecting him, looking up and down his body as if what he saw was a piece of dead meat rather than a living thing. ‘You took a hit, Doctor Quillon. Looks nasty. Where’s the girl and Meroka?’

Quillon said nothing. He tried to hold Kargas’s gaze.

‘I guess Tulwar couldn’t make it, right?’ Meroka said, sauntering over with the other lantern. She had avoided being shot, but must have realised there was no point in making any further escape efforts. The useless keys were still in her hand. ‘Sent his spineless fucking sidekick instead.’

Kargas let out a brief, sarcastic laugh. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Bring the ghouls. It’s time they were reacquainted.’

There was an exchange of words, a quick patter of footsteps, and Tulwar’s men moved aside. Two angels came into the vault, moving with their not-quite-normal gait, not so much walking as gliding, the way mist might drift across a midnight lagoon. They wore hats and long brown coats, cinched loosely at the front. Even as they approached they were undoing the cinches, shrugging the human garments onto the ground. They wore nothing underneath. In the yellow light they were pale as bone, as thin as sticks. They appeared too frail to stand upright, let alone to animate themselves. One was female and the other male, although Quillon doubted that any of the humans would have been able to make the distinction. The creatures were essentially sexless in appearance, reproductive and mammary organs sleeked away for maximum aerodynamic efficiency. It was only by the subtlest of cues that he was able to determine their gender with any confidence. Even as his body became more like theirs, it felt quite impossible that they had ever had anything in common.

With a flourish, a whoop of disturbed air, the angels unfurled their wings. They flicked out with the swiftness of spring-loaded blades, sharp-edged and faintly luminous, patterned with a pastel delicacy of water-colours. The wings flexed to provide lift, only needing to move gently for the angels to rise and fall, their feet leaving the ground with each downbeat. The show served no purpose other than to emphasise what they were, and what he was not.

‘We’ve come back for you,’ they said, in exact, trilling unison. ‘To return you to the Celestial Levels.’

‘If you can come down here as you are,’ Quillon said, ‘then there’s nothing you need from me. I don’t even remember any of the details of the old infiltration programme.’

‘You don’t need to remember them,’ the female angel said. ‘They’re in your head all the same. They just have to be extracted. Dug out.’

‘And we do need those memories,’ the male angel said. ‘We can visit, but we cannot remain. Even the best of our current infiltration units lack what you possessed: the ability to stay in a different zone - a very different zone - for months, years on end.’

‘Other people besides me were aware of the protocols.’

‘Dead, or vanished,’ the female said dismissively. ‘You, on the other hand, have endured. You are very precious to us. More so now than ever. We would, of course, like to take you alive. That will make the data-extraction work more straightforward. But the main thing is that you not fall into the hands of our enemies. They would find your knowledge equally useful.’

‘Except they’d want it for a different purpose,’ Quillon said. ‘To do good, to benefit all of Spearpoint. Not just to make a better army of occupying angels.’

‘Goodness is a question of perspectives,’ the male said. ‘We have ours. You have yours.’ The angel’s beautiful, porcelain head, with its lustrous blue eyes, swivelled towards Kargas. ‘We have what we came for. The girl is yours, when you find her. We ask only that her frozen corpse be presented to us for examination. It will be of interest to compare her with the others.’

‘Take him,’ Kargas said, jabbing a finger at his men. ‘The rest of you, fan out and find the girl. She has to be in here somewhere: if there was a way out, Meroka would already have found it. Tulwar doesn’t need her alive, but try not to make too much of a mess.’

A voice rang out from the darkness. ‘You mind if I chip in at this point?’

There was a ringing silence. No one spoke. The voice was not one any of them had been expecting to hear. Quillon thought he recognised it. He didn’t dare believe he was right.

Then Meroka said, ‘Fray?’

‘Aw, you spoiled the surprise. Ah well, guess the secret’s out now - may as well come clean.’ Without a sound, a lantern brightened. It was far off to one side of the vault, not too distant from the door Meroka had been trying to open. ‘Heard the commotion, thought it was worth investigating,’ the voice went on. ‘After all, it’s been a mite quiet down here lately.’

‘Hasn’t it just,’ said another voice: not so easy to pin down, but which Quillon thought he also recognised. Another lantern brightened, a few paces to the right of the first. The lanterns must already have been lit, light-tight shades now pulled off them, allowing the illumination to spill out.

The two men - Fray and Malkin - were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying - or at least aiming - what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less; Fray at Kargas and the other ambushers.

‘So,’ Fray said, ‘anyone want to take a scholarly guess as to what’s going to happen next?’

‘I think, whatever it is, it’s going to need cleaning up afterwards,’ Malkin said.

Fray thought about this for a second, then nodded. ‘Yep. Me too.’

There was a momentary hiatus, as if the world had stopped breathing.

The angels were the first to react, predictably enough. Their wings twitched.
Fight-or-flight reflex,
Quillon thought: it manifested in angels as surely as it did in unmodified humans, just in a different form.

Malkin opened fire. He had a clear line of fire onto the angels. He didn’t so much shoot them as dismantle them. They came apart in midair, as if they were being held there by fine wires, like dummies in a shooting gallery. The spingun burst probably didn’t last more than three seconds, and the direction of fire hardly shifted.

It didn’t matter. It was enough.

Malkin cut off his spingun, yanking the lever that interrupted the gas supply to the rotating barrel assembly, but by then Fray had started up his weapon and was enacting his own brand of wrath on Kargas and the other Tulwar traitors. He started and stopped, started and stopped, the spingun hosing a line of fire across the vault, the stuttering light limning details that had been invisible until now: soaring black pillars, a ceiling spanned by ebony arches.

At last Fray cut the gas supply and the gun spun down, sighing like a tired dog.