The Age of Scorpio (75 page)

Then the door on the other side of the Range Rover was ripped off.

Too many
. The shotgun was the wrong weapon. He heard the rapid firing of the carbine from the other side of the Range Rover – Beth was holding up her side of things. He fired the last round from the shotgun and let it drop on its sling. By now some of them had made it to the van. He could make them out crowding around the van and dragging someone, presumably Talia, out.

The six-limbed thing turned and looked at him as if noticing him for the first time. At least du Bois assumed it was looking; he could see no eyes on the bony, ridged, fan-like head. It bounded straight at him with surprising speed. He only just got out of the way as the door where he’d been standing moments before was ripped off its hinges. Du Bois fast-drew the .45 and at point-blank range fired again, and again, and again. The entire magazine was gone in moments. It sprawled across the tarmac, leaking some kind of violet fluid. The .45 was smoking, its slide back. Du Bois stared at the thing. He’d used all the nano-tipped rounds he had.

Two more of them clambered out of the passenger side of the van’s cab. Unerringly Beth poured fire onto them as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. Driven by a cold rage, she was giving some thought to going over there and sawing their heads off with her bayonet when she had finished shooting them.

Du Bois ejected the magazine from the .45 and slammed in another. Firing from one knee, he started putting two rounds into each of the mutated people carrying Talia. They staggered and some fell, but there were too many and he had to be careful not to shoot the girl.

He stood up, ejected the magazine, reloaded and fired again, walking towards the bus, using a different approach now – shooting them until they went down. Two more hit the ground, but they were still moving. He suspected he was putting a lot of rounds into members of the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club. Another magazine hit the tarmac as a new one was slammed home. He’d grabbed more magazines from the compartment in the back of the Range Rover after the gunfight in Old Portsmouth, but after this one he only had one more left.

The shot caught him in the shoulder, spinning him around. The ragged nano-fabric woven into the rags of his leather coat hardened, as did his skin. Had he been a normal man, the hydrostatic shock would have blown the limb off. One of the gunmen was firing through the rip in the side of the van. Du Bois turned on him, firing one-handed as he advanced, his left arm rapidly healing. Few of the shots were hitting but they had the desired effect of making the shooter keep his head down. When his left hand could move again, he pulled a fragmentation grenade out of his pocket and yanked the pin out with his right. He let the spoon flip off, his internal systems counting for him. Baron Albedo was firing as the grenade flew into the van.

The second was down but the third had made it to cover in front of the van and was returning fire. Beth was switching between suppressing him and putting more rounds in the two on the ground to prevent them from healing.

The van exploded. Beth prayed her sister hadn’t still been in there.

Du Bois had already turned and was sliding his last magazine home into the .45. The bus was beginning to pull away. He started running, trying to get an angle to fire on the driver. He risked two shots but they went wide. He fired the remaining six into what he was pretty sure was the engine block, but the bus kept on going.

He heard and his blood-screen told him that there was someone coming up behind him. He turned to see a man staggering across the tarmac, skin and flesh regrowing as he made his way towards him. Du Bois grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and rammed it into Baron Albedo’s throat. The blade of the dagger disintegrated into nanites that surged through Albedo’s systems, quickly overcoming the young man’s own nanite defences as they sought ways to kill him.

Baron Albedo, aka Clifford Sharman, had once been a nice kid from a little town in north-western Idaho who got picked on for being clever. He died on a stretch of motorway a long way from home.

Du Bois holstered the .45, ran back to the Range Rover and jumped into the driver’s seat, throwing the shotgun in the back. A lot of the mutated people he’d shot were starting to get up. He could hear sirens and there was a helicopter in the air above them. Du Bois prayed it was police and not media.

‘Beth!’ he shouted. Beth jumped in. ‘They’ve got Talia.’

‘What the fuck were you doing?’ she demanded. He put the Range Rover into gear and gunned it forward. Du Bois ran over Inflictor Doorstep and Dracimus. King Jeremy ran for cover around the other side of the smoking van as they passed. Beth glared at du Bois. He felt her stare but did not acknowledge it. He’d failed her.

There was no door on du Bois’s side. He reached over and pulled his seat belt on as he drove. Beth did likewise and then loaded another magazine into the hot-barrelled FAL. Neither of them noticed that the tentacle that had exploded out of the earth to bring the van to a halt had gone.

Du Bois took the Range Rover up the bank at the side of the motorway and into farmland, taking it across country to a road that would get them heading back in the general direction of Portsmouth. As soon as they were on the road he had another one-sided conversation with himself, requesting that the police stay off his back. Then he was requesting more satellite footage.

‘Do you know where they are taking her?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded and then asked her to get something from the gun compartment in the back of the car.

Passing over the M27, they got a chance to see the carnage they’d help create, two severe pile-ups, one each side of the motorway. The emergency services were struggling to respond. It had happened so quickly and much of Portsmouth’s fire, ambulance and police personnel would be at the site of the gunfight in Old Portsmouth. Circle influence or not, du Bois didn’t think that he’d be able to get out of this one. Someone would be hung out to dry, and publicly. You couldn’t keep blaming the Muslims. On the other hand, Europeans had been doing that since the Crusades – he of all people should know that.

Up onto Portsdown Hill, looking down on Portsmouth and Hayling Island next to it, on the other side of the Solent the Isle of Wight, a beautiful fresh sunny day with barely a cloud in the sky.
They were in a bus
, he thought.
How much further ahead could they be?

Past Fort Southwick, Control started sending the satellite footage directly into his skull. Not dodgy low-resolution, spy-satellite footage, but footage from the Circle’s own satellites, though they pre-dated the Circle; in fact, they pre-dated humanity. He saw the bus pulling into the lock-up at Fort Widley from high above.

There was no subtlety or stealth involved. Du Bois drove the Range Rover through the rickety wooden door of the lock-up in the Victorian fort, narrowly missing being impaled by splintering chunks of wood. He slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the rear of the bus.

Beth and du Bois were out of the Range Rover. Checking all around them. Where their eyes went the barrels of their guns did as well. Beth still had the FAL carbine; du Bois carried the .45 calibre Heckler & Koch UMP sub-machine gun that Beth had got from the gun compartment in the back of the car.

The lock-up had the same feeling as it had the first time he had been there. Cavernous and empty. They moved through it quickly, searching. Beth found the sacrifices.

‘Is this what they want her—’

‘I very much doubt it. Focus.’

Beth shook herself out of it. Du Bois knew that she was very much playing a part at the moment. He’d dropped some high-end skills into her head, and her natural talents and level of fitness had allowed her to keep up and integrate them quickly, but she would pay for it later with migraines that would make her wish for death, and probably with internal bleeding as well.

He spotted misshapen footprints in the grime on the floor. He cursed himself. He should have checked this place more thoroughly. He should have been more emphatic to Control about the importance of following this up and dealing with it, regardless of whether Control needed every last resource at the moment. The footprints led him deeper into the racks of equipment and down into the tunnels that ran through the fort. He signalled Beth and she joined him. They followed the prints.

They found the entrance in a storeroom. The passage was seven feet high and five wide. It looked recently dug. The walls looked fused somehow, which to du Bois’s mind wasn’t structurally sound. He glanced at Beth.

‘What dug this?’ she asked. Something didn’t look right. There was something more animal than human about this. On the other hand, it might have been her imagination playing tricks, what with all the strangeness of the last week.

‘At a guess, the same thing that drove a tentacle through solid ground to stop a van.’

‘Everyone wants Talia,’ Beth muttered.

‘Stay behind me and watch your shots. The rounds in your carbine will rip straight through people and into your sister; the ones in mine won’t. Any doubts, grab the automatic from the holster at my hip and use that instead, okay?’

Beth nodded and tried not to think about how many rounds she had put into the air during the fight on the motorway.

Du Bois didn’t say that if they encountered any more of the armoured six-limbed servitors they were in trouble because he had no more nanite-tipped bullets.

They crept into the tunnel. Moving swiftly, weapons ready. Du Bois was sure he could hear noises from further down.

It was a bump in the tunnel floor that gave it away. The walls of the tunnel, the roof and the rest of the floor were so smooth. It looked like someone had kicked up a bit of the floor on purpose. He stopped.

‘What?’ she asked.

He could hear her nervousness. Most of the rest of what had happened today had happened suddenly. Her system had been flooded with adrenaline, which her new augments would know how to use very efficiently if they were anything like his. But this walk into the tunnel was giving her a chance to think. Getting her scared. Giving her mind a chance to trip her up.

‘Malcolm?’ Nobody called him Malcolm except his sister.

‘Turn back. We need to get out of here right now.’

‘What? But—’

‘Now!’ They turned and sprinted back to the storeroom and then back out into the lock-up.

‘What’s going on?’ Beth demanded.

‘I think the tunnel was booby-trapped.’

‘You think?’

‘Would you prefer it if we were down there when it went off?’

‘What about Talia?’

It wasn’t so much that Beth was wearing him down – she had acquitted herself well, much better than most – it was more the day itself. It had been pretty intense, particularly for an operation on mainland Britain.

‘I just thought, perhaps unreasonably, that looking for your sister WOULD BE EASIER WITHOUT THOUSANDS OF TONNES OF RUBBLE ON TOP OF US!’ he screamed, finally losing it. Beth held her ground and looked like she was about to shout back. Du Bois was trying to work out how unprofessional it would be to have a cigarette. Meanwhile, he searched through the available information on the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club via the liquid memory of his neuralware.

The tunnel blew. The door to the storeroom blew off its hinges; the collapsing tunnel squirted rubble out into the lock-up. Beth and du Bois were covered in dust.

‘Andrew Coulson, a member of the diving club and a demolition engineer,’ du Bois said, though he couldn’t really see Beth through the thick cloud of dust.

‘Did they have any lorry or bus drivers in the club?’ Beth asked. Du Bois thought she sounded a little sheepish.

‘Helen Smith, another member, had a full HGV licence, and Brian Wilcox was a retired bus driver.’

‘Maybe we should get out of here?’ Beth said.

‘What an excellent idea.’

They walked back to the Range Rover.

‘Do you know where they were going?’

‘I have some ideas. McGurk said that Matthew Bryant, the one you fought, was found in a cellar in a house close to the front. If there’s enough left of McGurk I’ll ask him which house.’ Beth looked at him sceptically. ‘I don’t know who or whatever they are, but they have their own access to S-tech.’

‘S-tech?’ Beth asked.

‘I’ll explain later.’
Or more likely it won’t matter, because you’ll be on a Circle operating table being vivisected, your nanites harvested
, he thought bitterly, knowing she really didn’t deserve that. ‘But basically, seeding the local vermin didn’t work. And there’s a city in the way of accurate satellite thermographics, and that’s assuming they can’t counter thermographics anyway, which seems unlikely.’

Beth was staring at him blankly. ‘Are you just a madman?’

‘I’m not. Sorry.’

She watched an idea dawn on his face and raised an eyebrow.

‘When I spoke to Bryant’s wife, she seemed to be hiding something, or holding something back,’ he said.

They climbed back into the Range Rover as he instantly recalled Bryant’s wife’s address from his memory.

Down the hill through Cosham, onto the Southampton Road, under the motorway, Port Solent Marina and then Portsmouth Harbour proper on their left-hand side. Across the harbour they could see the grey stones of Portchester Castle. Beth noted that du Bois was driving less like a psycho now. Admittedly the roads were busy but she knew it meant less urgency. Less urgency meant less hope.

Du Bois turned the battered four-by-four, which was getting some stares – particularly as it was missing a door – into Castle Street. Beth noticed the nice houses down by the castle. She couldn’t even begin to imagine living here or what that world was like. It was more alien to her, almost, than the madness of the last few days.

The air was full of the sounds of sirens. There were now several helicopters in the air. She could see one close to the Spinnaker Tower at Gun Wharf. She guessed that was over the scene of the gunfight in Old Portsmouth. The others were to the west over the carnage on the motorway.

Some kids pointed at the Range Rover as they drove by. Beth stared back because she was too numb to think about turning away.