Fractions (26 page)

He was letting the gun point downwards, his grasp light but ready to clench. He stopped.

‘Hey!' he shouted, above the hum of vehicles. The men looked as if they hadn't heard him. He opened his mouth again and heard at the same moment a yell from Janis and a rhythmic clatter behind him. He whirled around in a crouch, bringing the gun up. Coming straight at him was a horse, and the wild-haired creature on its back was unclipping a crossbow from a slot beside the saddle and reining in the horse and dismounting all at the same time. Everything went slow, even the sparks from the skidding hooves. He saw another horseman, galloping up to the truck from behind. He fired a burst that ripped through the rider's thigh and into the horse. He saw the forelegs buckle under the beast's continuing momentum, saw the beginning of the rider's trajectory, then turned to his own attacker. A barbarian woman. She was two metres away and was half a second from bringing the crossbow to bear on him. (No time to fire.) (What?) He sprang forward and brought the butt down on the woman's shoulder. The crossbow clattered away. He punched her straight under the sternum. She fell, balled up around her pain.

Kohn dropped and rolled. Something buzzed over his head. Snap. Sting of stone on his face. Ricochet. The shot had come from the Cadillac. To his horror he saw Janis leap from the truck's running-board and dash towards him, head down and firing off pistol shots inexpertly behind her with her left hand. Her glades were on clear and he could see her eyes behind them, tightly closed.

The Cadillac roared forward, doors still open, gun muzzles poked above them. Flashes. There was a terrific bang as a tyre blew out. Suddenly the car was yawing. Janis dived past the front fender and down on top of him. She rolled over and sat up, bringing another hand to the automatic's grip. The rear of the car swung past. Janis fired and a dark body dropped from the open left door.

She turned to him and opened her eyes.

‘Are you all right?' she asked.

‘Come on.' He jumped to his feet and pointed back to the doors of the cafeteria. ‘In there.' The car, steadying now, was between them and the truck.

They ran for the doors and pushed them open, hurdled the prone bodies of terrified civilians to the stairs. At the first turning Kohn saw a Man In Black just reach the doors. There was no way to shoot at him without spraying half the foyer. On up the steps to the glass-enclosed walkway above the road, leading to a mirror-image service area on the other side. They started the hundred-metre dash across.

Something was coming up the stairwell on the far side. Halfway along was a recess with fire extinguishers and an emergency phone. Kohn hauled Janis into it after him. They flattened back and Kohn glanced out.

Another horseman was cantering along the walkway. In the opposite direction Kohn saw the Stasis man leap to the top of the stairs and hit the floor, a heavy pistol clasped in both hands in front of him. Kohn jerked back.

The padding hooves stopped, close.

‘Throw out your weapons.' The agent's voice sounded strained and strange. ‘Don't say a word or you'll be shot.'

‘Oh, shit,' Kohn said through his teeth. Some part of his brain began displaying detailed pictures of what would happen to it if he were captured. He wrenched his attention away from images of bone-saws and drill-bits and trodes in time to catch Janis's urgent low whisper: ‘…just the guns, then use anything you've got left, they mightn't expect all you've got…'

Kohn looked at her and nodded. She tossed the pistol on the floor. Kohn followed it with the gun. It landed on its bipod. Kohn raised his arms and was about to step out when he heard the creak and tinkle of thin glass breaking.

‘
FIRE
!' said the alarm, in a deep, calm chip voice.

The gun opened up. Janis stepped smartly forward before he could stop her. She'd grabbed a fire extinguisher. She jumped in front of the horse and aimed the foam straight for its eyes. It screamed and reared, striking the rider's head against the ceiling. He fell backwards. Janis was at the horse's side in an instant, shoving at the saddle. The animal tottered, off-balance, rear hooves beating a desperate prance, the fore-hooves hammering at the glass. The rider's legs kicked until his feet disengaged from the stirrups. He slid down the slope of the horse's back. The huge window broke. The horse went through the glass in a sickening slow motion and vanished. Janis ducked, scooping up the pistol. The rider was sprawled on his back, one arm underneath him, the other making warding-off motions. Janis stood astride him and pointed the pistol at his face.

‘Don't!' Kohn yelled.

The gun continued its scything fire. Kohn threw himself behind it. It was supposed to respond to his voice only. He forgave it, this once. The agent was gone. Must have rolled to the stairs. Nice. None of the holes in the far wall were lower than half a metre.

The gun stopped, out of ammo. Kohn peered through the howling gap down at the mound of meat on the central reservation.

He looked at Janis.

‘That was dangerous,' he said. ‘You might have killed somebody.'

She glanced back as Kohn slammed another clip into place.

‘We're in the army now,' she said, and turned back to the man at her feet.

‘
So you can't shoot him now! He's out of it
!'

Janis shook herself and stepped back. ‘OK, OK.' She gingerly took an automatic and a sheath-knife from the man's belt and rolled him off his broken arm. He'd already fainted.

They ran back the way they had come. Janis stood clear as Kohn crawled to the top of the stairs and used the gun's sensors to look over the edge. Nothing there. They went down the stairs and out across the foyer, back to back. Nobody had responded to the fire alarm. Just as well.

The whole place looked as if a gas bomb had hit it. Everything intact but bodies everywhere. Vehicles still pulling in seemed suddenly to go on automatic: driverless. Good reflexes, these civilians. Nothing between here and the truck but the Cadillac, and the slumped body of the agent Janis had shot. They got behind an inexplicable object, a sort of concrete tub filled with packed earth. (Kohn had always vaguely assumed the things were provided to give cover in shoot-outs. Part of the facilities.) He edged around it and very deliberately pumped a few more shots into the body.

‘I'll go first,' he said. ‘Give you cover.'

He crossed the tarmac as in an unpredictable dance with an invisible partner: dash and stop, turn, fall, roll, jump, run, swing around…He'd just passed the body when the head and arm came up. A pistol shot zipped past his ear. Kohn looked at the body – dark skin, dark suit, dark stains spreading, the unsteady hand squeezing for another go. Gun, you do let me down sometimes. He aimed carefully, and sent the agent's pistol spinning away. The man moaned on to his broken hand. Kohn looked at him, then shrugged and walked to the cab. The engine was still running. He waved to Janis. She dashed across, her only manoeuvre a wide swing around the man they'd both failed to kill.

As they pulled away the other agent sprinted across their path. Kohn swerved to run him down, but missed. The last thing he saw in the rear-view before going down the exit ramp was the Cadillac transfigured, shining in a beam that matched its colour and stabbed straight down from the sky.

 

Janis looked at her hands. They were shaking, and no effort on her part could make them stop. Of course not, she thought, annoyed with herself, and looked out at the vehicles ahead. Outlined with almost diagrammatic sharpness by the glades, their colours a spectrum-shifted stab in the dark, the cars and trucks and tankers paced and cruised and fell back and overtook. Slow relative to each other, cruelly fast from the roadside view, the pedestrian perspective. Or the equestrian. The thought raised a smirk.

She turned to Kohn. He was mouthing into the mike that angled in front of his lips. He saw her looking and stopped.

‘Just arguing with the gun,' he said. ‘I think it's become a pacifist.'

He looked so serious that Janis laughed.

‘I've gone back over everything in my mind,' Kohn went on, ‘and it seems to me that I aimed at the head and not the leg of that rider who was coming up on you. The gun says it went for the larger moving target. The woman who attacked me – I was just going to blast her, but the gun flashed at the time that there was no time to fire. So I had to break her collarbone instead.'

‘It didn't interfere when you shot that
MIB
to finish him off. But…you
didn't
finish him off!'

‘No, that was gen,' Kohn said. ‘Five lead rounds went into him.' He laughed, not turning from the road. ‘It's like I said. They ain't human – at least, not all the way through.'

‘You could have tested that theory on his head. Or was that the gun again, staying your hand?'

Kohn grimaced. ‘No. It's just – it's all right to shoot somebody if they're down but might still be a threat, but otherwise, no. Something like that. I should have killed him, you know. That green you brought down – very well done, by the way – you can't
finish off
someone like that. Just a grunt like us, basically. Disarm and leave if you can't take prisoner or help. Stasis is different. They're not under the Convention – secret police are like spies in wartime as far as I'm concerned: anyone has a perfect right to shoot them down like dogs.'

‘So why didn't you, damn it?' She was surprised at how angry she felt.

After a moment Kohn sighed and said, ‘Just a bad mercenary habit.'

 

There was no indication of pursuit, but they decided they'd better enter
ANR
territory by a less direct route than Kohn had originally planned. They swung east and came into Edinburgh from the south. They turned left at the North British Hotel on to Pretender Street, then right and up Stuart Street, across Charles Edward Street and down the long hill towards the Firth of Forth. (The city council had changed dozens of street-names in a fit of pique at the Restoration, and no one had since dared to change them back.) At Granton Harbour Kohn drove the truck carefully out along the long stone pier to a wooden jetty at the end. The harbour was full of small sailing-boats. Rigging chimed against masts. Away to the west they could see against the sky-glow of towns the twisted remnants of the Forth Bridge, like a shy child's fingers over its eyes.

‘Looks like the road stops here,' Janis pointed out.

‘We just have to wait.'

‘You've done this before!'

‘Yes, but not here.'

After about an hour – Janis dozing, Kohn smoking – they heard diesels chugging. A trawler, its bow-wave unhealthily phosphorescent, the green-white-and-blue tricolour of the Republic snapping from its stern and a shielded machine-gun at the bow. It came to a halt in the water about ten metres from the pier.

‘Get out of the truck,' said a barely raised voice.

They clambered down. Kohn wondered how they were supposed to identify themselves.

‘Who are you?'

They gave their names.

‘Fine, fine,' said the voice. ‘The machines told us tae expect you.'

The boat pulled in and a rope was thrown on to the jetty. Kohn, rather awkwardly, wrapped it around a bollard. A dozen people swarmed out of the boat and all over the truck, turning load into cargo. Whenever either Janis or Moh started forward to help they were politely told to get out of the way, and after the third time they did. The truck was backed along the pier and driven off to be returned to the Edinburgh branch of the hire company, with paperwork to show that it had been somewhere else entirely. Janis and Moh were escorted aboard and the boat cast off and headed across the water to the dark coastline of Fife.

‘Funny thing,' Janis remarked as they stood in the wheelhouse, sipping black tea, ‘you can't smell the fish.'

Kohn made a smothered, snorting noise, and the helmsman guffawed.

‘There hasna been a
smell
of fish here for years!'

This comment was borne out when they landed at the harbour of what, to Janis's enhanced vision, looked even more like a ghost town than it was. It had obviously once been a fishing port, then a tourist/leisure marina. The few people who lived here now were
ANR
. It wasn't exactly a front-line place – there was no front line – but it was on a tacitly acknowledged border of one of the patches of territory that made up the Republic. A controlled zone.

Two vehicles waited on the quay. One was a truck, to take the cargo. The other was a low-profile version of a jeep, a humvee. Janis and Moh stood uncertainly on the quay with their bags and weapons. A tall man and a short man got out of the humvee and walked up to them.

The tall man was wearing a dark jumpsuit with a row of tiny badges – national and party – on the breast pocket. Kohn recognized it as the closest the
ANR
had to a uniform, and, judging by the large number and small size of the badges, this guy had to be of very high rank. Face fleshy – more with muscle than fat – relaxed mouth, broken veins on the cheeks. The small man was almost hidden in a bulky overcoat and a homburg hat, in the shade of which his fine-boned face was lit by the glow of a cigarette. Only one people had features quite like that.

The tall man smiled and shook hands with Janis, then Moh. He knew their names.

‘Welcome to the Republic,' he said. ‘My name's Colin MacLennan. I'd like you to meet a man who's very keen to meet you.' He turned to the small man with a flourish.

‘Our scientific adviser, Doctor Nguyen Thanh Van.'

 

‘We have to look very closely at the influence of Gnosticism, right, because there we can see a major opposition to Paul's misogyny, OK, which was later on to manifest itself in the so-called heresies of the Middle Ages—'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre slithered sideways, made a frantic grab for a handhold, caught a bunch of something like hair, and got heaved off the animal's back for the fifth time. He ran after the beast and remounted, while four anarcho-barbarist terrorists looked politely away. He almost wished he were lying forward strapped to the horse's neck, like Aghostino-Clarke. On the other hand, if they'd both been as helpless he wouldn't have put it past this lot to butcher them and black-market the bionics.