Ditched (part 10)

  “You know, if I manage to get that door open this whole ship will probably slide off whatever precipice it is perched on and we will fall to our deaths.” I tell Jimmy.

“That's the spirit, a positive mental attitude.” I grin and focus on getting close to the door.

“Its not my attitude that's the problem, its the attitude of the universe to me.” Elbow forwards.

“I'm sure you're just its temporary plaything, sooner or later it will forget about you and you can go back to doing whatever it was you were up to when you brought all this down on yourself.” Ignore the sudden pain of a metal shard sticking into the arm.

“Which was what?” Heave.

“I haven't a fucking clue, but its going to be hilarious watching you figure it all out.” Other elbow forwards.

“My guess is that I as looking for a priest, I need someone to exorcise this bothersome ghost I've been saddled with.” Progress is graduate but definite, I wish I could say the same about my memory.

“Meanwhile, think you could stack enough of this junk up so that you can reach the door release?” Jimmy brings me back to the job in hand.

“Manual labour, just what I need, I was hoping for a management position.”

“No, I've check all the relays for faults, the result is correct.” Liefman confers with Fernandez about the gravimeter readings, we have been convinced that the instruments were giving false readings. We have been taking advantage of the break in deceleration to conduct drone flights and take as many instrument readings as we can. “The back-up unit concurs.”

“But that means its so dense, no wonder we can't even scratch the surface of its hull.” Fernandez has been disappointed by our lack of progress in making any sense of the object and it shows in new lines on her face. “What could they have made it out of?”

“Some kind of super-heavy stable element that we have yet to synthesise, or maybe even a shell of collapsed matter protecting a more conventional interior.” Interjects Davis, happy to see the conversation wander into his area of expertise.

“The song just gained a new element.” Peterson has been working hard on the signal the artefact broadcasts, so hard with so little result that I am going to have to get Tseng or Patrick to convince him to take a rest.

“There does seem to be some kind of repair going on.” Jimmy shunts two pictures to my screen, one of the initial damage, the second timestamped a couple of minutes ago, changes are circled like a spot-the-difference puzzle. “The thing is still alive, but its not going to be quick enough to avoid hitting the Earth and making lots of people very unhappy.”

“Someone do the calculations, how much thrust would it take to shove it out of its collision course with the Earth? I'll talk to the folks in mission control.” The cessation of the artefact's drive has brought communications with home back on line, allowing a sharing of data but bringing its own complications.

Ten minutes of talking with Bayard station, the signal lag both mercifully and terrifyingly short, gets me nowhere. The accident has been digested, regurgitated, dissected and finally taken out and buried, bad press the company does not want, now they will not agree to anything without a full committee hearing. Meanwhile they have missiles on standby, ready to take out the alien device before it causes damage. If they are lucky they might be able to grab one or two of the left-overs.

The figures tell me it can probably be done, depending on the accuracy of our mass reading, which has been called into doubt and whether our hull can take the stress of being used as a bulldozer, but we have to start now. I feel the urge to call my wife, but we spoke an hour ago, there is nothing I can add and it is just procrastinating, so I just write a three word message and mail it.

A message flashes up onto my own screen – You're the captain. Vickers.

“Right, we're doing this. You have two minutes to dock the drones, park the instruments and get fully suited up.” I made this mess, I am solving it.

“Hey, you can't go against the orders of base control.” Davis with the first objection. “The ship can't handle the stresses.”

“I don't want to die out here.” Peterson with the obvious.

“I am in command of the mission, if you don't like it feel free to file a complaint with H.R.” I have been wanting to use that line for ages.

“At least put it to the vote. We should all get a say.” Davis continues. I see Patrick in deep conversation over the radio and signal Liefman to instigate the procedure to break communications links restrict control access, something that was not installed when we left the station.

“A quick show of hands, then. Everyone for?” Saunders, Liefman, Ikaro and Jimmy all raise their hands alongside mine as I expected, Fernandez wavers and then joins us. “Motion carried, fasten your seat belts, people, this is going to be a bumpy ride.”

Moving stuff without legs is difficult. I grab the handle of an intact cargo cannister, a stackable box a metre long and half as wide, and pull it towards me. My effort succeeds in moving myself towards it. Bracing a hand on the ceiling gives better results, but its going to take far too long to drag it into position like that.

The cannister is locked electronically, I take a guess and put Peterson's terminal close to it, the option to open appears on the screen and I confirm it. The lid hinges back automatically revealing neatly stacked plastic boxes, each with a sculpted handle and a sealed lid. The terminal, taking a cue from some chip in the cannister displays the identity number and inventory.

SUDU887654-6 Contents: 16 Jars of Bees.

“That's a handy way of carrying your bees, I'm surprised no-one thought of it before.” Jimmy imparts.

“You know, I think I'm having one of those days where suddenly discovering sixteen jars of bees is not the pinnacle of weirdness.” This is a mystery that I just do not have the energy to fathom. “Still, they should make handy building blocks.”

“Are you not even tempted to open one just to see?” Jimmy implores.

“If I had a field full of flowers crying out for pollination, then maybe. Do you see a field full of flowers?”

The flowers sway in a simulated breeze, an entire meadow of digital daisies soaking up the electronic sunlight and vying for the attention of coded insects. Of the three screens Liefman has set up in the back of the truck two are dedicated to this picture, the other is showing the displays from a mix of local traffic and surveillance cameras. Again I glance at my watch, showing the feed from the truck's reversing camera, no sign of pursuit.

“Pack it in, Bill. There's nothing you can do at the moment.” Liefman says without looking up from her screens. “Rachel and Idira know where we are going and are not going to attract any attention. You're just not very good at doing nothing.”

“Never had much practice.” I switch my watch to a local news channel and catch live pictures of our hideout billowing smoke while soldiers maintain a perimeter. A tap sends the feed to my glasses, the better screen allows me to pick out the insignias on their uniforms, a mix of local militia and the circled man of the Weathered Sun Alliance. I pull my glasses from my face in disgust. “Fuckers.”

“Do you mind? I'm trying to listen to twelve different channels simultaneously.” She hits a switch and suddenly a host of people speaking over each other is audible over speakers.

“And you can hear anything in this racket?” She sighs, shakes her head, flicks a couple of controls and the audio changes to a slightly atonal procedurally generated song, the sounds of the meadow, flower jazz.

“Its the way the angels listened to stuff, a thousand voices, all talking at once. They gave us the capacity, I've been teaching myself to use it.” While I have spent my time chasing down clones of a maniac and hiding from authorities.

“I let Jimmy handle that, I can barely pay attention to one person speaking at a time. So what's with the flower screensaver?” The dancing flora is beginning to get on my nerves.

“Its a combination of monitoring program and simulation of the angel form of consciousness, combined with my own theory on ecosystem management.” I blink at her. “It reads and listens to a lot of things and then sorts out trends and anomalies.”

“And the flowers?”

“Its a visual interpretation of the infosystem, and a simulation using the noise of the data as a kind of random number generator.” I give her my best blank look. “I like flowers, okay.” I never buy her flowers.

“So, is it actually useful?”

“Its what has been tracking Davis and his activities. Gone are the days when we could rely on sympathisers and moles in his organisation, he's become so secretive. Nowadays its all pattern recognition on signals, freight traffic movements and posts by worried citizens on forums.”

“I see. Say, when was the last time you had any actual fun? You know, with another real person?” I ignore Jimmy's raised eyebrow.

“Last year, with that biologist in Oslo.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that. Whatever happened?”

“She joined the Weathered Sun Alliance.”

“Ouch.”

“No, I persuaded her to take her work to them.”

“What? Are you losing it? Remember what happened to Ikaro? Who do you think the New Humanists are working for now?” The truck brakes suddenly and there is a second while we regain our balance.

“The WSA have weeded out the radicals and terrorists, they are the one group that seems to be doing any good. Have you seen the progress they have made on the Californian blight? They have a working counter-agent for the Ivory Coast pathogen and rumour is that they are looking for money from the orbital consortiums for a serious effort on India.”

“You seem to have a very short memory for whom is trying to chase us down at this very minute.” I flick my watch back to the feed from the rear-facing camera, nothing but Seville's ruins and construction traffic.

“Bill, we're the terrorists nowadays. We don't ask for permission, we just go in and smash things, then get out and hide. All this crap is down to us, it all came out of our blood.”

“I am just frightened that they might get whatever Davis is working on before we do and conveniently forget their saviours of the world stance.” And deep down I worry whether Davis is right, should we unlock the full horrors of the Angel's gift?

“Don't worry about that. You might have notice how focussed we are nowadays.”

“Yeah, our hit rate on Davis is fantastic, I didn't think it was just down to luck.” I am just not that lucky.

“I have friends in the WSA, we share intel. They get all the nano chop-shops and gene butchers, we get Davis.” I decide she was waiting for the right time to tell me this, my temper has not been at its most level recently.

“And this raid?”

“Notice that we got out in time? I couldn't warn you, you would have tipped off Ashley. We won't be working with him any more.”

“Another of my friends turned dirty, I should have guessed.” I sit back and decide to take a snooze, more and more it seems my life is not in my own control.

“I bet you never even played with building blocks as a toddler.” Jimmy watches me drag to cannister up to the wall and then start to pile up jars to form a rudimentary staircase.

“I guess I was always more into smashing things than building them.” The jars are sturdy and do not rattle when you shake them, something tells me that you should not shake jars of bees, but if they have not been shaken by the crash then there is no shaking these bees. This is what it feels like to finally give in to your madness.

“That figures.” There is another slide, the craft vibrates around me and my makeshift tower vibrates but does not fall.

“Do you think anyone would mind if I ignored the safety aspect and forgot the handrail?”

“Lets just get this over with, quickly.” Jimmy agrees.

She is not in a good mood. She hates these corporate hospitality events more than I do, but it fell on the one night she could not legitimately be otherwise occupied and she owes me for attending some awful modern jazz award ceremony. At least I can do business here, she has to be sparkling and witty and the perfect trophy wife. The best I am hoping for is sarcastic and snappy and the perfect drunken strife.

Outwardly her mood only shows in the way she grips my arm, otherwise she is a shining star. The long, tight dress glitters in the lights, showing that she has gained precisely no weight since the day we married. There may be a few lines on her face but they were earned with smiles and laughter. Her make-up is minimal, an honest lack of vanity. Her hair is rebellious, full, streaked with grey and, as ever, doing its own thing.

The lawyers are still ironing the creases out of the contract, but everyone acts as though the deal is done. Even Birgit Hausmann has dropped the stern disapproval she customly wears as Benexwell's head of procurement and greets us dressed in a smile. The result is a bunch of high powered aerospace industry executives making small talk and trying not to be caught eyeing up the buffet, while a string quartet plays something classical, elegant and dreary.

“This is all very....tasteful.” She comments, knocking back her drink and waving embarrassingly at the waiter for another.

“The epitome of high class living,” I agree. “I bet the crab cakes are from some endangered species.”

“Exquisitely killed with a diamond headed hammer.” Glancing around she spies the grand piano sitting unused by the musicians. “Check out baby! I'll just...”

“Remember look but don't...never mind.” She is gone before I can warn her not to do anything that may jeopardise my chances of being called in as a consultant on future deals.

I turn away and join in a discussion about the increased tension between companies and the trend for branching out into a more self-reliant model. The waiter has just about recognised me signalling for a refill when I hear the open bars of Whiskey Shack Shindig played on piano with the unusual accompaniment of a string quartet. All eyes turn towards the sound except my own which I bury in my hands.

“Is that your wife? She's something else.” Birgit Hausmann homes in on my distress.

“She is that. Fancy a dance?” It appears we are playing the embarrass each other in public game again.

“I'm afraid I don't dance very well.”

“I only have one leg. Fancy a bad dance?”

“Ah, a long stick, and excellent choice of implement, classic lines, elegant design, truly a prince in the world of poking stuff.” Jimmy applauds my selection of part of a shattered composite rod. My hastily piled construction is still not tall enough for me to reach the door release so I have decided to resort to the old stand-by of hitting it with a stick.

“Shouldn't you be warning me about my heart rate and not trying to raise my blood pressure with your commentary?” I lean the stick against the wall so that I can reach it from the top of my tower and start to lever myself up the first step.

“Don't worry, I'm just remembering some old tricks, although we might have to find you some sustenance soon.” Taking another though, I turn around and pull myself up backwards, supporting my weight on the stump of my torso and then sliding it up to the next step.

“Food? That should be interesting. You realise that I don't actually have an arsehole, present company excepted.” It is heavy going and my breathing get heavier, but there is little of the crushing tiredness climbing the crab brought.

“You'll just end up full of shit as always.” A slight wobble makes me slip, I teeter on the brink of crashing back down to the ceiling and then regain my balance. I try an experiment.

“A tenner says I manage to open the door without falling off.” I form the words in my mind without saying them aloud and push them to Jimmy.

“My tenner says you crash and burn and the door stays shut. Hey, you're relearning old tricks, maybe you're not a dead loss, after all.” Another push and I am at the top, I prop myself up against the wall and retrieve my stick.

The door catch is covered by a little door, it takes a couple of swipes of my stick to open that, all the while feeling my balance. My perch is not as stable as I would have liked and leaning against the wall makes it less so. I prod the revealed button a couple of times to no avail, it is difficult to see it from this angle. Stopping to steady myself, I take the time to study it.

“Looks like you flip open that handle and then pull it.” Jimmy decides to be helpful for once.

The end of the rod has broken into a rough point, it takes me several goes to insert it under the handle and then it slips out when I apply leverage. I swear at it.

“Slow and steady, Bill.”

“You want to do this yourself?”

The point trembles as I push it in again, the motion hampered by my position.

“Nice one, now...” Jimmy is cut short as a shudder passes through the ship's hull. The cannister shifts underneath me and I feel it parting from the wall. Pushing with what strength I can apply I feel the switch move, but gravity has won this round. My balance is suddenly lost and I am perched on thin air.

Crashing down heavily, I lie winded for a few seconds, expecting to feel the stabbing pain of broken ribs and see a blood-covered metal spike sticking through my body. It hurts, but I am lucky. There is a continual grinding noise. I swivel my head expecting the worst, but it is only the door jerking open, fighting against its own damaged mechanism.

I pull myself from my demolished pile of jars and towards the aperture, peering through the opening. A short corridor ends in what has to be the outer door, it makes sense that a space-worthy vessel would have a airlock, I just had not considered it. I sigh.

The door keeps grinding until it halts, there is a gnashing sound and it halts, leaving a slight burning smell. A faint whirring gets louder and louder, culminating in a bang. Something falls and the room floods with light.

I awake with no remembrance of having slept. There is no grogginess, no phantom ache from my lost leg, no clutching for the alarm. The after-image of a dream floats away from me and there is something I should recall, something important.

The room is small, nothing more that a six foot cubicle with no door or furnishings, the walls are a dark grey, slightly soft to my touch. I am already standing, as though I slept that way. Jimmy stands opposite me, but not Jimmy, young Jimmy, looking and dressed as he was on my wedding day, all those years ago. I open my mouth to ask him what is happening but his puts his finger against my lips and then taps it on the side of my head.

Everything floods back and I am danger of drowning in a torrent of memory. The desperate rescue; fighting for control of the ship; the stresses, strains, breakages; Jimmy's death, my own; victory? I sink down to the floor under the weight of it and hug my legs like a child. Two naked legs, I do not appear to be wearing clothes.

The wall of the cubicle fades away as though it was never really there. I scramble to my feet, determined not to be seen in a state of weakness. Replacing the wall is a depth of inky darkness, somehow I know I cannot enter it. Motes of light swim in the murk, as though tiny organisms deep beneath the surface of the sea and I sense that something huge lurks just out of my sight.

Just as I start to turn to ask Jimmy what it means, a being floats up in front of me. Its head is featureless, its body emaciated and tapering down to a flat tail. Three pairs of long, thin arms emerge from either side of its chest, they each end in six many jointed fingers with barely any hand. Jutting from its back is a pair of large, translucent wings. Its skin is a deep maroon, but studded with many little points of white light, so that it shines like a delicate cluster of stars in the night.

It is an angel, it sings to me. Many small orifices open in its chest, each with its own voice, a choir of one. I start to protest that I cannot understand, but realise that I can, each voice is another aspect of the message, they flow together to produce a picture of the whole. It is too much for me to take in at once, but Jimmy helps me with the translation.

“You gave your lives for ours. We return them to you. The one we could not fully save is now the other part of you. As you wished. Go now back to your people. We are old and become more of us. We just find those who can repair us. Goodbye. Grow and become fuller.”

The walls all fade away. There are eight others, all naked like me, all staring at the angels. We stand in a larger space. The angels swim away and we are left looking at bright motes floating in darkness again. Some of us murmur to ourselves, some are silent, one whimpers and pleads that he is dead. With nothing better to do we file slowly through an opening, an incongruous doorway into a station airlock.

Ditched (part 9)

Despite my surroundings, my body relaxes. I can ignore the smell, my bisected body and all the horrors this day has brought. Sleep almost claims me when the ground once again decides to shift itself. The floor rumbles, the walls vibrate and the crab almost seems alive. I look up at Jimmy.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Nap time is over.”

The ship balances again at a slightly different angle and some loose items fall somewhere in the cargo chamber. Clambering over the rearmost legs, some of which seem to be armed with tin-openers or some kind of vicious bladed anchor, I get a look at the back of this space.

The bay should open out wider, but the floor has collapsed in, squeezing the room into a corridor. A couple of severed crustacean limbs poking out from the wreckage gives a hint as to what was once housed here. I look across a space covered in debris and what I assume to be items of crab-care, and there, as promised, is a cargo hatch. Closed, of course.

“Why is nothing ever easy?” I ask Jimmy.

“Plenty of things are easy, but you always choose the difficult options.” Replies Jimmy, shunting the latest fuel predictions across to my screen, they are not good.

We are so close to the artefact that the external cameras can resolve its image without much help from the computers. Only hundreds of kilometres of nearly empty space separate us, nearly empty because we have lost the race. Sino East's craft, the Emerald Challenger has beaten us to the prize, their gel-filled design has allowed them to survive greater forces of acceleration and now they sit between us and our goal, completing final manoeuvres to bring them alongside the alien ship.

My mood is a little bleak, due to the toll the constant acceleration on my body which is not as young as it used to be and due to having to sit a psychiatric evaluation a couple of hours ago. This is not the first time I have had to submit myself to such a test during this mission, and due to Liefman hacking into the program and leaking me the optimal answers certainly no hardship, but the implied mistrust of the company weighs on my mind.

On the positive side, our communications with home base are being disrupted. Some of this was electronic warfare from the Emerald Challenger, part of an ongoing cold war between the various missions vying for the same prize, this has seen some craft forced to abandon the chase and limp home, suddenly the reliance on human beings in our set up makes more sense. We suspect the majority of the interference is coming from whatever exotic particle reaction is powering the artefact's own drive, magnetic fields deployed imply it is using some sort of ram-scoop, but other than that our physicists have yet to agree on anything.

“Any suggestions?” I ask the crew.

“Open the window and throw someone at them.” Saunders says.

“Or use a drone as a guided missile.” Adds Jimmy.

“Too expensive, but not without merit.” My brain adds a few things up. “Number seventeen fuel tank is nearly dry, if we shut off engines for a minute or two and kick the tail out we can send it their way. They will be able to dodge it, but it should waste some of their fuel and give them a scare.” I start inputting the data into the system to create a simulation, Jimmy, Ikaro and Fernandez do likewise.

With no real objections from the crew, and four simulations giving similar results I let the computer do all the work. We get a brief period of blessed weightlessness, a quick sideways shove from the manoeuvring thrusters first one way, the other, and then the first again. The shuffle complete, the main engines turn back on. A camera tracks the ejected tank as it appears to drop away from us and towards its target, an illusion caused by by our deceleration.

Our craft, the Emerald Challenger and the artefact are strung our in roughly a straight line, all headed towards the Earth and all decelerating at different rates, with the artefact leading. The tank, tumbling slowly, free from any outside force takes nearly a minute to close the distance to its target. The camera, out on a boom and with the computer removing our exhaust's glare from the picture, zooms in.

“They're not reacting.” Jimmy observes, nervously.

“Dodge it, damn you!” I call, as the Emerald Challenger finally begins an emergency avoidance manoeuvre.

Too late. The tank clips the side of the ship at a closing velocity somewhere in the region of a kilometre and a half per second, there is a spray of debris and then something in their engines lets go, sending the ship out of control and causing it to fall towards the artefact. We watch in horror as the ship encounters the field of the artefact's ramscoop, which shreds it, scattering engine parts, communications equipment and crew into the vacuum.

“You reckon we can get it open?” I ask Jimmy as I begin to pull my way towards the hatch.

“Something is powering the emergency lighting, so there's a fair chance the door release might work on what remains in the batteries. Besides, have you got anything better to do?” Jimmy has a point.

“I'm just a little worried we'll open the door and find out we're somewhere without a breathable atmosphere.” It has struck me that all my effort may be for nothing, prolonging the inevitable.

“I think you'll be fine, this boat must have been leaking its air since we crashed. I have not detected any problems with your lungs and air pressure seems fine.” Optimism, the refuge those just about to be unexpectedly shit on from a great height.

“A non-Earth planet with a compatible atmosphere? Now we've entered the realm of kids stories.”

The crush of adults wearing black, the ruffled hair and words of sympathy from people I do know know, I leave it behind me as I walk carefully and quietly down the strange corridor. In one of these rooms Imogen is sleeping, I should find her, make sure she is okay with all these strangers around. Finally I manage to undo the tie around my neck and throw it on the floor, ties are for grown-ups and they can keep them.

A couple of open doorways lead into rooms full of furniture and adult stuff, I briefly hide inside one to avoid someone leaving the party to go to the toilet. It is an adult party, boring snacks, horrid smelling drinks and all talking, no games. The day has lasted forever and there has been no fun in it, maybe there will never be fun again. I hold back a snivel, I promised myself, no more snivelling.

I push open another door, no Imogen, but there is a screen in this room. Maybe no-one will mind if I watch a show for a while, if I shut the door behind me then the noise will not disturb anyone. The remote control is lying on the sofa, so I climb up next to it, lift it carefully in my hands and concentrate on pressing the right buttons to bring up my favourite channel. The screen rewards my actions and comes to life.

The spacemen on the screen explore a fantastic alien world, full of adventure and mystery. It is a colourful world, far, far away from having adults constantly ask if you are okay, from being told it was fine to cry, from no-one telling you what was going to happen now, far, far away from wanting your parents but being told that they now live with the angels.

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the route to the cargo hatch is paved with sharp objects, hanging cables and pieces of structural support that have done their job and are now having a peaceful retirement. The floor is nicely surfaced to allow good traction, but it is a shame that the floor is three metres above my head and I have to make do with the decidedly less tractive ceiling. It could be worse, I tell myself, but right now ravenous space vampires would be welcome company.

“Jimmy, what did I do that was wicked enough to deserve this?” I ask my companion.

“You want a list? I admit that while you have made many bad decisions, most of those were made with the best of intentions, however you do make exceedingly poor choices when you are bored, annoyed or have not had your morning coffee.” I admit that does sound like me.

“And I did something bad enough to get on your shitlist, too, but you're not going to tell me about that, I must remember it.”

“Yeah, well, we'll talk about that later, if you don't get out of here then its really not worth arguing about. Right now you need to get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.”

“That would be a little easier if I still had my main engines.”

There is something wrong with the artefact, the output from its engine varies wildly, forcing us to constantly alter our own thrust to remain alongside. We can only assume this is due to damage sustained from parts of the Emerald Challenger passing through whatever mechanism lies inside the enigmatic craft.

The ribbed back surface bears no clues as to its origin, there are no visible openings and it defies our attempts to stick something to it. Radio channels suffer from both the interference from the engines and from some signal coming from inside the craft. Our computers decode this latter signal as an audio stream that sounds much like choral singing, a hundred voices all nearly singing the same song but with slightly different words. At times it almost makes sense and I find myself humming along.

Peterson has been working at decoding or translating the song non-stop, but has likened to so watching waves in the ocean, they all look similar, there seems to be a pattern, but really it is a chaotic system with no meaning. The artefact has not made any meaningful response to any signal we have sent it. Even without seeing his evaluation scores I know the stress of the mission has got to him and his failure to make any headway at the one task appropriate to his skills is bringing him close to breaking point.

Fuel usage is still an issue, we believe that base will have to capture us like a mis-thrown rock from the asteroid belt mining operations. All-in-all things are not going well.

“I'm registering some kind of oscillation in the artefact's drive output.” Fernandez breaks into my reverie. She sends data to everyone's screens. “Looks like its getting worse.”

I glance at the graphs and the output projection, make a quick mental calculation and come to the conclusion that it can only spell disaster.

“I'm moving us away,” I make a couple of adjustments to the controls and feel the additional force as our engines give us more power and the artefact begins to slide to our stern. Flickering light in now visible in the views of the cameras, we still have little idea how the drive works, but this is certainly not a good sign.

The readout gives our distance as fifty kilometres when there is a sudden brightening of the light. It goes out just as quickly. I turn to Fernandez.

“Was that...” There is a huge burst of incandescence and the picture from several cameras goes out. Several alarms go off and we have out hands full with damage reports from a variety of systems. Another display shows the artefact from an undamaged camera, the engine section looks slightly mangled and now that it is unpowered it is heading straight on a collision course with the Earth.

The door release is about a metre and a half from the floor, which takes it way out of my reach, fortunately there is an emergency release at floor level, unfortunately we are upside-down.

“Maybe it is voice activated,” suggests Jimmy, brightly.

“Door, open,” I call without expectation. “Let me fucking out of here.”

“Maybe not.”

“If there is one thing working properly on this thing then it will not be anything useful.” I pause to catch my breath, looking over my shoulder I see a clear path amongst the debris, my snail-trail.

“You never know, you might find a fully functional cocktail bar.”

“My doctor has advised me against drinking, excess exercise and chasing ass, sorry.”

I nearly lose Davis in the maze of corridors. The others are clearing up in the lab, but we are having to move carefully to avoid tipping off the authorities to our presence, while I pursue what has become an increasingly personal vendetta.

Rounding the corner into another near-identical painted concrete access-way, I just catch the movement of a door swinging to. My sprint takes me to it before it closes fully and I catch a glimpse of the harsh sunlight, a fire exit. I quickly divest myself of any incriminating equipment, our presence here is covert and would not at all be welcomed, but retain a pistol and taser, what the discerning citizen is carrying nowadays. Pushing through the door I try to look as though I belong there while scanning the street for my quarry, I spy him half a block away, walking quickly whilst trying not to look as though he is in a hurry.

This side street is anonymous, flanked by the backs of buildings and intended for deliveries and refuse collection, but it still carries the monitoring equipment that is the price of living in such an enclave. Computer systems watch cameras for suspicious activity, atmospheric sniffers warn of airborne nano-virus threats and a private army protects the privileged from the nastiness that the world has sunk to, paradise for the few.

My glasses darken against the midday sun, and bring up the map of my surroundings. I am surprised to see how far from our entry point I have strayed, access tunnels and storm shelters linking in a labyrinth under the enclave's surface buildings. There is no evidence of a security response to our incursion, but I do not hold up hope of that lasting.

My stride lengthens, a man with a purpose, business to conduct and no time to hang about. My face has been altered and is stored in the local system; paramilitary styled clothing never fully goes out of fashion so I fit right in with the locals. I tell myself I belong here, but deep in my mind I know I am just building an ever taller tower of lies.

Davis turns onto a major street, taking him out of my view. I resist the temptation to hurry after him, the map shows there is nowhere for him to hide effectively before I reach the corner and my longer legs are slowly closing the distance. The map suggests he is fleeing towards a shopping mall, plenty of places to hide and people to get in the way.

“Bill, status, please.” Liefman's voice comes through the earpieces in my glasses “You've strayed from the area.”

“Don't worry, I've run into an old friend and I'm just heading for a little meeting. I'll make my own way home, you go on without me.” I am probably being paranoid worrying about lip-reading software, I imagine Liefman rolling her eyes and giving me up for a lost cause.

I round the corner, joining a trickle of people on a shaded boulevard. Davis is ahead of me, threading his way between strolling families and trying not to look over his shoulder. It is a comedy chase scene, neither of us wanting to attract attention by running but both trying to go as fast as possible. Ironically, the best thing for him to do would be to stand still, there is little I could do that would not end up in my detention, but he knows what has happened to the other clones and has let fear override his logic.

The rotating glass door of the mall swallows him up, but it is a matter of seconds before I following him inside. My glasses adapt again to the change in lighting, bringing up a map of the mall as well as links to special offers, a touch from me cancels this distraction. I take advantage of a knot of people, crouching slightly as I edge around them, trying to avoid being seen whilst keeping lookout for Davis. I pretend to look in a shop window, scanning reflections and side glances.

“Nice cut, but not your colour,” opines Jimmy. “Stick to something darker to match your expression.”

As I relax my face I catch sight of Davis, not scuttling for the far exit, but browsing jackets, maybe hoping to disguise himself and double back on me. I take a circuitous route towards him, but I am spotted and our slow motion chase begins again. As we had back towards the entrance there is a ripple of noise that passes through the shoppers, gasps of shock and horror.

A man in a long black coat is standing in a ring of free space, he seems confused and a little desperate, his eyes imploring, his skin wan and sweating. The coat has fallen open revealing a bare chest. A deep red mass, the size of two spread hands clings to and enters the skin, purple tendrils snake off it, entering his body at other points, the whole thing pulses rhythmically with his racing heartbeat.

There are screams in the crowd as containment shutters drop down and then the sharp, flat smack of a handgun as someone chooses to protect themselves with reactionary violence. I use the confusion to get close to Davis, his hand nervously toying with something in his pocket, entranced and repulsed at the same time. For all his being at the centre of things, he has had little exposure to to results of his work.

A voice over speakers asks us to remain calm, explains that we will submit to tests and decontamination and that there is nothing to worry about. Small flying drones arrive, separate us off into small groups and begin shepherding us through an unmarked door. I manage to stay close to Davis.

“Looked a lot like the Indian outbreak, is that what they were working on here?” Jimmy ponders. It did indeed look like the infection that had destroyed the population of the subcontinent and had only been brought under control by drastic measures.

“Davis was too startled, if it is related then it must be something much subtler.” I think back to him. “And we still don't know what their goal really is.”

We are held in a small room while men in biohazard suits run portable sniffers over us. Jimmy assures me we have nothing to worry about until they take a blood test at which point all the alarms will go off. The technicians give me disapproving looks as I use my glasses to call Liefman, but I am not the only one making a call.

“Could you try making things easy for me once in a while?” She asks. “The game's up when they take a blood test, use the confusion to try and get out, I'll see how I can help you.”

“Just caught up with something that wasn't my doing again, honey. Shouldn't take long, see if you can book me an air taxi and I should be able to make up to time. Missing you too.”

Scenes like this are common enough in the enclave that everyone submits to the blood test without discussion and no moves are made to search us for weaponry. I exchange a surreptitious glance with Davis, a shared memory and common knowledge of what will happen next. The blood samples are fed one by one into a device, the results come up on a screen and the next candidate is let out of a door with advice on his cholesterol level and a thank you for his co-operation.

The screen flashes up an message in red and an alert sounds, the technicians start to react, but I am ready, drawing my pistol and putting a shot into the screen to distract them from sounding the alarm. People recoil from me and I step forwards and grab Davis by the arm, hustling his surprised form out of the door pointing the gun at anyone looking like they might make a move.

“You can't escape, we're both trapped here.” He tells me.

“I don't care, taking you out is my only goal.” I reply. I pull his arm from his pocket, in his grasp is a stubby ten centimetre vacuum flask, a containment vessel for something nasty, I rip it from his fingers. “What are you working on? Why do you need a lab in a city?”

“Its the big picture, its nearly here, you can't begin to realise how important this is, this could make it all worth while.” Typical Davis, he flaunts his superiority while quaking in his boots.

“All those deaths? The only thing worthwhile now is stopping whatever it is you are after, and this is a big clue.” A siren starts to remind me of the urgency of the situation.

“The golden age is c-.” I use the remains of my gun's clip to paint his brains onto the wall, pocket the vial and start to run.

“Definitely a clone,” adds Jimmy. “An old one, all the signs of deterioration were there.”

“Shame. Can you get me my hearing back? I might need it.”

“Sure, I'll do that, you find us a way out.”