The Baba Yaga (2 page)

The complaints stopped at once, and Jenny started to pull off her pyjamas. Jenny would do anything for Daddy.

The chattering began, and Maria said, “We need to be quiet, Jenny. Can you do that?”

Jenny eyed her. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Banana.”

“Is that all?”

“You can have something else once we’re on our way.”

“Okay,” said Jenny. She lifted her arms to her father. “Up.”

“Please,” said Kit.

“Up, please, Daddy.”

He lifted her, and she put her head against him. He nodded at Maria. “Time to go.”

She nodded back. “I’ll leave on the lights,” she said. “It’ll look like we’re here.”

“Okay.”

And that was it. They were gone, slipping out of the flat and down the stairs, away from the routines that had served their whole married life, and into a dangerous, unknown future.

They got into the little car. From the back, Jenny—wide awake now, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—looked at them with sharp inquisitive eyes.

“Where are we going, Daddy?”

Maria looked over at Kit.He gave her a strained half-smile.

“Somewhere new, pet,” he said, to Jenny. “Somewhere we’ve never been before.”

Somewhere safe
, thought Maria, and then her blood went cold.
If we’re not already carrying the danger with us...

Hennessy’s World

Later that day

A
LITTLE SOUTH
of the equator on Hennessy’s World, the most populous world in the Expansion, lay a vast archipelago. Spread across these hundred thousand islands were the offices, playgrounds, and palaces of the Expansion’s richest and most powerful.

The waterways had been a challenge to the founders of the great city, but one which they met with confidence and panache. Taking lessons from the past, they sunk the foundations of their city deep, and they built with new, lightweight metals, which reflected back the water and the sunlight in triple harmony. The towers shot upwards—but they built downward too: great cavernous buildings of strong plastics developed for this purpose, some opaque, some transparent, so that the deep ocean could provide a backdrop for the days and nights of the people who lived there. No city as big or as ambitious had existed before in the history of humanity: but then, no empire of this scale had existed before to match the great reach of the Expansion, stretched out over hundreds of worlds. The city’s founders wanted a capital fit for humanity’s greatest empire, and they got it, naming their creation Venta, after another great city of old.

But the lightness of the city was deceptive. A great darkness was approaching Venta, and a gloom hung over the Expansion’s most senior servants. One of these is now making a journey by flyer from the outlying island where she has spent the night to her place of work.

The flyer is on autopilot. It takes a smooth path, mostly uninterrupted: air traffic around the capital is tightly regulated, and at this height, permits are restricted to senior officials and military personnel. Few people really see Venta from above; either they hug the ground, snarled up in everyday traffic, or they’re packed into near-orbit craft, so expensive and uncomfortable that few can be bothered to travel in them. But the passenger in the flyer is a person of great importance. Her name is Delia Walker and she is a senior analyst with the Expansion’s intelligence agency, the Bureau. On another day, she might enjoy the view her privilege gives her. But today she has a great deal on her mind.

The flyer continues to its destination: a large square building on Santa Maria, the capital’s largest island. It comes to a halt over the top of the building, hovering there as a great hatch irises open beneath it. Then the flyer falls, in a swift but controlled descent, into the heart of the building. It is a long time since Walker found this part of her journey exhilarating. These days, arriving at work fills her with dread.

The flyer decelerates, and then gently lands. The hatch has sealed above her and the bright sunlight is gone, replaced by the gloomy artificial light of the carpark. Walker leaves the flyer quickly, grabbing handheld and briefcase, and heads to the dropchute. The chute takes her down—further down—deep into the bowels of the great square building, and Walker doesn’t step out until it reaches the bottom floor. She walks along a bright white corridor interrupted only by colourful but unimpressive paintings, and, reaching the big double doors at the end, presents her datapin to gain entrance to the big meeting room beyond.

It is one of those great caverns that the builders of the city liked so much. On one wall, many viewscreens are stacked in rows, pumping out information from across the whole Expansion; the other three walls are transparent, at least to the people inside, and beyond them deep sea creatures swim about, staring around them with huge unblinking eyes.

K
INSELLA,
W
ALKER SAW,
was already there. Sometimes they varied it, so that she arrived first, but today he had left half-an-hour earlier than usual. Walker passed behind him on her way to the coffee and tapped his shoulder in greeting. He twisted his head slightly in acknowledgement, nothing more.
What a farce
, she thought.
Why do we keep up this pretence?
Surely everyone in this room knew exactly what they were up to in their spare time. She certainly knew everything about them. It was their business, after all. Walker herself could compile dossiers on the private lives of pretty much everyone in this room; it made for an interesting if sly office culture.

Three colleagues—for want of a better word—were gathered by the coffee dispensers, deep in conversation. They fell silent when Walker came near. No surprises there; they would be her chief rivals in this morning’s debate. She ran through what she knew about them. All ex-Fleet, part of the inrush of personnel from military intelligence who had come in during the war with the Vetch, and after. They were a bureau within the Bureau: a different culture that sat uncomfortably with the careful civil servants, brilliant analysts, and enabled boffins who historically had filled the ranks of the department. Chief amongst the ex-Fleet people was Commander Adelaide Grant, who stood now in the middle of the three, stirring her coffee slowly and studying Walker in turn. There were, Walker thought, more Fleet officers here than a few years ago. The Weird threat had breathed new life into Grant and her ilk, providing a focus for their hawkish outlook.

Walker turned away. What Grant wanted was not what she wanted—either for the Bureau, or for the Expansion. The war with the Vetch had ended in an uneasy truce, which, with the Weird providing a common enemy, was turning into an equally uneasy alliance. And even if it had taken the Weird to bring the old enemies together, the fact remained that peace—or détente—
had
happened, when, twenty years ago, nobody would have believed it. And this was why Walker believed that the same had to happen with the Weird. There had to be another way, even with something as alien and destructive as the Weird.
Because God knows we won’t destroy them with brute force...

We have to be smarter than that.

But Grant and her people wanted the end of the Weird, by any means necessary, and for this they wanted money and resources to go towards their current cause—developing the ‘superweapon’ that Vetch scientists had devised, and which had hitherto proved unsuccessful.

Walker’s stomach turned, suddenly. She took her hand off the coffee pot and instead poured herself a glass of water. She sipped, swilling the water round her mouth, washing away the sour taste, and watching her enemies—her colleagues
—
watch her in turn.
We know about you
, they seemed to be saying,
and we will not hesitate to use what we know
. She knew what they were thinking, because she was thinking the same. She looked around the room, taking stock: the doves, on this side; the hawks, gathering across from her; and, here and there, the undecided—a combination of the waverers, not quite able to make up their minds, and those who simply enjoyed making their colleagues in both camps sweat. The Bureau employed a lot of people like that, and a substantial proportion made it to this level. Walker had done the same, when it served her ends.

She sat down in her usual place next to Andrei. Andrei Gusev, one of oldest of the old-school at the Bureau, sly and clever, and thoroughly ill-disposed towards the military types starting to fill the upper echelons of the Bureau these days. Goose-steppers and heel-clickers, he called them. No nuance. No subtlety. Only one set of weapons for every kind of problem—and no sense of the long game. No sense that while persuasion might take longer, it could be a considerably less costly way of doing business. Walker had been one of Andrei’s deputies for several years during her thirties. He had taught her what low cunning could do that brute force couldn’t, and—slowly, surreptitiously, and entirely according to his principles—had sold her this vision of what the Bureau was for and how it should operate. A tool more complex than any weapon.
Find the common ground
, he would often say.
Enemies beget enemies. So turn your enemies into your allies.

“Good weekend?” Andrei said. It was beneath him to gesture even slightly towards Kinsella.

“The usual.”

“I dread to think,” he murmured. Andrei did not approve of the affair, Walker knew, clearly thinking it a lapse of both judgement and taste. “I hope you weren’t too—how shall I put it—otherwise involved to be able to put some thought to our forthcoming imbroglio?”

“Don’t be pert, Andrei.”

“I ask only for the benefit of our cause.”

And for your own voyeuristic amusement, you nosy old bugger,
Walker thought fondly. “Well, of course,” she said. “Rest easy. I’m not going to lose this one.”

Andrei sighed. Under the guise of reaching for her glass, Walker took a good long look at him. He seemed tired, as he often had in recent months, as if the thought of the fight ahead wearied him.
Not long
, she thought, coolly, but not entirely without compassion.
Not long before he quits all this and goes back to his island to potter around on that little boat
. She had seen it many times: officers for whom the fight lost its allure; who became wearied at the thought of yet another round of chilly, committee-room combat. They sickened, sometimes suddenly, and then they were gone, a lifetime of effort all brought to nothing. But the battle went on, and Walker, at least, hadn’t tired of it yet. Not with people like Grant on the warpath.

The heavy double doors swung open, and the room went quiet as Latimer entered. Everyone—hawk and dove alike—studied the man carefully as he made his way round to the head of the table. The newly appointed head of the Bureau was an outside man, parachuted in by Council to unite what had always been a hotbed of personal rivalries in the face of the Weird crisis. It had not yet done the job. The competition remained, although now just two groups were competing for Latimer’s attention and approval. At some point he would have to show his cards and back somebody. Walker was damned if it was going to be Grant’s lot.

Latimer settled in his seat, taking his time. He was tall man, austere, like a Benedictine monk. He didn’t laugh much—in fact, he didn’t laugh at all—and he didn’t talk much either. He watched. As he laid out his handhelds and screens, the rest of the room shuffled impatiently. Walker saw Grant roll her eyes. If the people in this room had one thing in common, it was resentment at how Latimer was playing them: biding his time; keeping them guessing. This was not how it was supposed to be. Council was supposed to jump when the Bureau ordered, not the other way round. What was the point otherwise of having all that dirt on the political class?

Latimer looked round the room and gave a thin smile. The assembled elite of the Expansion’s spy corps smiled back, wanly. Walker’s stomach lurched again.
It has to be today,
she thought.
What Latimer decides today will affect the Expansion for decades to come...
Beside her, Andrei sighed again, as if letting a little more of his will leave him. “Let the revels begin,” he murmured.

T
HE BATTLE LINES
were clear from the outset and, throughout the morning, the hawks seemed to have the upper hand. Certainly they were making the most of available evidence, in the form of graphic and gruesome images from worlds where the Weird had attacked. Hardly anyone in the room could watch them in full. The Weird—in their ambulatory forms as Sleer—were repulsive to look at, like mobile, human-sized afterbirth, and their destruction was without conscience, although clearly with purpose. In the images Grant was now showing, the hideous creatures—human-shaped but palpably other—ravaged a city on the world of Rocastle, tearing the human population apart, limb from limb. The hideous Flyers, vast monstrosities of bulky grey flesh, flanked with tiny eyes and suckers, had come in waves, landing and disgorging a relentless tide of pitiless, hideous Sleer. It was carnage, and of the bloodiest kind.

Walker forced herself to watch the devastation for as long as she could, but eventually she had to look away. Instead, she started to watch Latimer. He gazed steadily at the screen, hardly seeming even to blink. Walker glanced across the table at Kinsella, who was looking at her with a question in his eyes.
When
, he seemed to be saying,
are you going to step in, Walker? When are you going to respond?

Walker shook her head, almost imperceptibly. Not now. Not in the face of this. But her moment would come.

The footage came to an end. Grant, turning to her rattled audience, said, “This is the enemy we face. This is what we are up against. And what we must all understand is that the Weird might be amongst us now—here, in this room. They can infect human minds—any of us in this room, right now, could be an agent of the Weird. For this purpose, I am proposing that we introduce mandatory screening of all government employees: a test that will enable us to discover who has been infected and prevent them from accessing positions of power—”