The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (27 page)

Dana shook her head again and dragged her sleeve across her face. “Jananin,
they
did it. The birds and the rats.”

Jananin looked at the ground, and gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod.

“The
birds
?” said the man in a low voice. Dana wished he would go somewhere else. She needed to tell Jananin that she had let the animals out of the lab at the Emerald Forge, and she couldn’t do it with him there.

Jananin turned to some people dressed in white plastic costumes who had entered through the gate behind them. “I need specimens collecting of these animals.”

The people began to stoop over and poke dead rats and starlings into plastic evidence bags with hands clad in purple gloves. A policeman had come to stand in the doorway behind them, and he beckoned to Jananin.

“Perhaps he’s found some evidence outside he wants us to look at,” Rajani suggested.

Dana followed him and Jananin back to the entrance. With the policeman was another man, wearing a white jacket and trousers, and white trainers.

“This man says he works here,” the policeman introduced the newcomer.

“I was on the other shift. If I’d been on the night shift, I...” He trailed off as his eyes wandered to take in the column of rising smoke.

Jananin interrupted his reverie. “What can you tell us about one of the patients, a certain Gemma Percival?”

He looked sharply at Jananin, and Dana noticed his pale, glacial blue eyes and a goatee beard on his chin, and some other memory she couldn’t pin down stirred. “She had schizophrenia, or something, I don’t know the official diagnosis: I’m just a care worker. She escaped months ago. It did make it onto the local news, although it was awkward trying to publicise it. She was understood to be a risk to herself, but probably not to others. Her parents didn’t seem to care, they didn’t want to go on and make an appeal or anything of that sort. To them, she was an embarrassment, and I almost feel they sent her here in the first place to hide her out the way.”

Dana stared at the pattern on the man’s shoes and the seams on his trousers. She had seen this before. A memory of raised voices came back to her, a struggle. Rough, heavy hands pinning her arms, forcing her down...

“You’re one of them! You’re one of the torturers!”

The man looked down at her and started, a look of worried panic coming over him. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed her there before. He recovered himself quickly. “The patients here were ill. We did what we could to help them and keep them safe.”

“You tied the patients to the beds and didn’t let them go to the toilet!”

That same nervous startle again, that searching stare. And then Dana realised it. He was afraid he might have met her before,
inside the hospital
.

“Dana,” Jananin interrupted, “there is nothing illegal about what this man does for a living. He has come here to furnish us with information. Your questions are entirely inappropriate and utterly disrespectful.”

Dana bit back the hot anger that threatened to rise from her mouth as another vehement accusation. She spun to face the gates at a heavy, muffled sound that she sensed as much through her feet against the ground as with her ears, the noise of something of great weight hitting the ground. A man in uniform — either police or military, she wasn’t sure which — ran out and shouted breathlessly to them. “Someone’s trapped inside the building.”

There came another noise, a screech, like an animal and yet unearthly. The man from the
Stormcaller
pushed past Dana and ran for the gate, gripping his machine gun with both hands. Jananin went after him and Dana followed her.

She froze in the gateway. Part of the fire-damaged front wall of the building was leaning, slowly at first, but gathering speed as it surrendered to gravity. It hit the ground with a heavy smack and broke into bricks and a billowing cloud of dust and ash.

Something was clambering into the gap left behind, an odd shiny quality making it visible despite the dust obscuring the scene. It wasn’t metal reflecting the sunlight, Dana realised. The thing gave off a light all of its own.

Something had started making a buzzing noise, and Jananin looked quickly at the screen of her computer slate. “I’m picking up radiation. Fall back!”

A mass of people rushed back to the gate. In the confusion, Rajani grabbed Dana’s arm. He flung her down behind the wall and fell on top of her, his weight crushing her into the dry earth. “
Shut the gates!
”

Dana crawled out from under the man as the metal bars clanged back into place and wormed across the dusty ground towards Jananin, who was shouting instructions into her mobile phone. After she’d put the phone away, she picked up her slate, which had now become silent, and studied it. “The wall appears to be blocking it.” She twisted her shoulders to examine the wall. “It’s not particularly thick, so I think we can assume the emissions are alpha and beta radiation.”

This was something from the Emerald Forge. When Dana had released the birds and rats, there had been something else as well, but she hadn’t got a clear view of it. “Jananin... in the Emerald Forge, there was something they’d made, like some kind of bird.”

Jananin turned to Dana. “Where exactly did you get those burns?”

“I let it out. I let the rats and birds out as well. I didn’t realise.”

“It’s not a bird. You saw it yourself just now. It’s too big.”

“It’s not a real bird. It’s like the wyvern, something made to look like a made-up thing, like an animal that doesn’t really exist, that comes out of myths. What kind of mythical birds are there?”

“A pelican?” Jananin suggested. “A phoenix?”

A phoenix. That had to be it. Phoenixes were meant to burn, weren’t they? This phoenix burned with radioactivity.

“It’s got a brain,” said Dana. “I mean a brain from an animal. It’s not just a machine.”

After a pause, Jananin said, “So what we have here is a biomechanical construct plated with some sort of radioactive material, piloted by an organic brain.”

The man from the
Stormcaller
made a grim expression and shuffled his gun under his arm, raising the muzzle and settling his fingers on the handle. Jananin shot a glare at him. “If you’re thinking about blowing it up, all you will do is contaminate the entire site with radioactive debris.”

Another screech came from behind the wall. The gate rattled.

“Any better suggestions?” the man asked.

“Oh, I have some.” Jananin pointed to the car they’d arrived in. “The AV is covered with polymer alloy that can absorb or block pretty much anything with a wavelength below gamma rays. If we stay inside, we’re more or less protected.”

“How does that help solve the problem?” the man answered. “There’s nothing to stop that thing flying away. It probably will have done by the time backup arrives.”

Jananin considered before replying. “We’ve got two AVs. We could use them to herd the construct into the remains of the building and attempt to barricade it in there.”

“In that case, someone has to get out to open the gate, and risk exposure, and then again to put up a barricade once it’s trapped.”

Dana had been sitting with the back of her head resting against the wall, half listening to the conversation as she tried to sort through what she could remember of her encounter with the phoenix. “Why don’t you put the phoenix inside the car — the AV or whatever it is — instead?”

Rajani turned his head to stare at her. An embarrassing incident in the old school flashed into her mind, when Miss Robinson had told the class how to do something on a computer, and Dana had put her hand up and told her a much quicker way because she’d thought she might like to know, and Miss Robinson had spoken to her harshly for being rude and made her stand facing a wall while the rest of the class sniggered at her.

“I’m not saying it, like, to criticise. I just wondered why you wouldn’t be able to do that instead?”

The man laughed abruptly. “Not at all. That’s quite the best suggestion I’ve heard all week. And here we sit, me a trained tactician and an Air Commodore, and Doctor Blake here a Nobel laureate!”

Jananin grimaced. Dana fancied she might have rolled her eyes behind her dark glasses. “There is the problem of how we are going to make the phoenix go inside the AV.”

“The phoenix is attracted to signals,” Dana explained. “All we need to do is put something in the car that emits a signal, like a mobile phone.”

Jananin thought this over for a moment. “Very well. Even if it doesn’t work, it should at least distract it for long enough to stop it from flying off until backup arrives. We should ask all extraneous personnel to leave and get everyone else remaining into the other AV in case it doesn’t go to plan.”

“I’ll sort it out,” Rajani volunteered. He gestured to another man in similar uniform to come and speak to him. “Jananin, take Dana to the other AV.”

“Why do we have to wait here instead of help him?” Dana asked Jananin as they crept towards the vehicle, keeping close to the wall.

“Let the military deal with it. They’re trained and it’s their job to protect us.” Jananin opened the passenger door for Dana. She climbed in and waited for Jananin to come round the other side and enter through the driver’s door, looking up once more at a blue sky made dim through polymer alloy glass that could block alpha and beta radiation. She wondered where Eric had been the night this had happened.

“You can get hold of information on people and stuff from all over the country, can’t you?”

“Some information, yes. Not information the Freedom of Information Act exempts me from.”

Dana put her hand in her pocket and fiddled with her fuse. “What information’s that?”

“Unpublished research, people’s private business that I have no right interfering in.”

The car had an air freshener made from a piece of cardboard with spots in red, orange, and green like a traffic light, only the green light was a protruding, crystalline piece of plastic. She remembered Graeme having one like that in his car, on the very first day he’d brought her and Cale to his house. “Can you find out about people? Can you find out if Eric Cartwright has come home or not since we pretended we were going on a school trip, and can you tell Pauline and Graeme I am okay?”

“I’ve already got word to your foster parents. I’ll look into the other person when we get back to the base.”

“They’re my adoptive parents now.”

Jananin shrugged.

Rajani and the other man were reversing the other car up to the gates.

“Who is that man?” Dana asked. “There’s something about him I don’t like.”

Jananin scowled. “Don’t be irrational.”

“I think I’ve seen him before, something to do with Gamma and the dreams!”

“He’s an Air Commodore in the Meritocracy’s Sky Force and the Royal Air Force. He is completely trustworthy. You cannot put faith in dreams. They are merely the way your brain processes the information it has gathered during the day. It’s just your mind defragmenting to use a computer analogy. Steve Gideon studied it and tried to use it in his advanced computer design.”

Dana didn’t say any more, although she didn’t believe Jananin. Jananin had made mistakes about people before. She had been proven wrong to think Pilgrennon would not keep his word back at Cape Wrath, and she could be wrong in thinking this man was trustworthy. “But the dreams with Gamma in were real, or at least part real.”

“They were generated via some kind of shared consciousness mediated by the Internet. You have picked up details from the consciousness you shared the dreams with via the dreams themselves, but this doesn’t mean the dreams are true or give you any reliable way of gauging which parts of the information you have are accurate and which are not.”

“I dreamed Pilgrennon came to see me when I collapsed after the
Stormcaller
.

Jananin shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Then that just shows how unreliable it is.”

The men had by now opened the back doors of the vehicle and pulled the gates open. They hurried out the way and crouched down in front of the car. Movement flashed in the gap between the gates and the door, and the van’s suspension dipped as something climbed in. The men leapt up and ran to slam the van’s back doors.

Rajani came back to the car, a relieved grin spread across his face. He knocked on the car’s window and Jananin opened the door.

“I like this kid, she thinks outside the box!” he said.

“They’re sending a helicopter with a transport crate,” said Jananin. “They’re shipping it to a secure area for decontamination. I need to get moving. You can handle it from here, I trust?”

The man nodded, and then he stepped back and saluted.

“What will happen to the phoenix?” Dana asked after Jananin had shut the door and the man was walking back to the other car. “Will you be able to make it unradioactive and keep it alive?”

Jananin didn’t look at Dana. She kept her eyes fixed on the windscreen and the view outside, one hand resting on the steering wheel. “No. Something like that, we can’t keep alive, not like the wyvern. It’s too much of an aberration. The radiation it’s emitting will probably kill it anyway, even if we don’t.”

“What happens now?”

Jananin reached under the steering wheel and started the AV’s engine. “We go back to base. This counts as a crisis situation. I will need to consult the other Spokesmen, and a vote will need to be cast on what must be done next.”

-12-

J
ANANIN
crashed through the doors to the small ward where Dana had spent the night before. She cast about the empty beds. “Where is that fat Scottish woman?”

The nurse appeared through the side-door that led to the shower. “I’m here, and my name’s Tarrow.”

“This child came into your care in the early hours of this morning, and you failed to notice she was suffering from radiation burns!”

“
Radiation burns
?” Tarrow indicated to the bed. “Here, Dana, sit down. She had a bit of mild erythema, nothing I thought was significant. Kids go out in the sun these days and they won’t wear hats.”