Only Forward (29 page)

I grabbed my coat. My hunch was that Bellrip was the man who had arranged for Alkland to get into Stable, tucked away in a state-of-the-art computer. For him to have done that, they had to have been pretty good friends. If anyone was going to be able to help me find out more about Alkland, he had to be the guy.

It took me five hours to get to the Natsci entrance portal. I'll spare you the details: as I couldn't risk the chance that there might be ACIA men at the Colour portals, I had to get off a stop early and get into Fat Neighbourhood by another means. I even took the precaution of leaving my apartment building via the roof, clambering intrepidly across a couple of other buildings before surreptitiously stepping off a fire escape into the late morning crowds. Fat Neighbourhood is a newish Neighbourhood where people go to escape shapist conditioning. People who don't conform to culture's stereotypes of how slim or attractive you should be go there and hang out, free from pressure to feel bad about themselves. It's a great idea, but as everyone who lives there seems to be on a diet, I don't think it can be working terribly well. Their mono was functionally challenged, as usual: I suspect they think fixing it would constitute forcing it to conform to culture's stereotypes of a useful; means of transport. Getting into Natsci is a relative formality. It's-not a complete free-for-all like Colour or the really relaxed Neighbourhoods, but it's not tough. You just have to be able to name five famous computer programmers and four basic sub-atomic particles and demonstrate a mild interest in monorail-spotting. I have no interest at all in the latter, but I know what to say. I can fit in.

I was presented with a map and told to enjoy my time in the Neighbourhood. Once I was out of the portal I switched the map on and searched for Bellrip's address. It was only about half a mile away, so I decided to walk. The most popular leisure pursuit in Natsci is standing by the mono and noting down the serial number of the carriages. Never mind the terrifying dullness of such an activity, I personally find it a bit unnerving to keep passing knots of little men and women in white coats staring into your carriage and taking notes.

The maps are cool, actually: I think they should have them everywhere. What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn. I configured it for Bellrip's house and set off down the spotless street. Natsci is a very tidy Neighbourhood. They have all manner of little droids which scuttle round the place perpetually cleaning everything up.

Assuming nothing untoward had happened, Alkland should be asleep by now, unless he was sitting up awake and wondering where the hell I'd got to. I'd told him I'd be back, and I thought he trusted me enough to know that I would be. But on the other hand I'd said I'd be back for dinner, and I hadn't been.

Ever since I'd left the apartment I'd been trying to relax my mind, ease out the tenseness which would make it harder for me to sleep. It wasn't working: I still felt irritatingly alert. Not being able to get in touch with Zenda to check she was all right was getting on my nerves too. I wished I'd thought to check her biog when I was online, to check she was still listed as Under-Supervisor of Really Hustling Things Along. But I hadn't.

All in all, I was a stressful little bundle of fun as I tramped down a variety of streets to one of the Neighbourhood's residential areas, guided by quiet promptings from the map. I stopped off at a newsagents to pick up some more cigarettes and scanned a copy of Centre News to see if there was any mention of Alkland's disappearance, but the whole thing was clearly still under wraps. Back on the streets I tossed my old packet away and a nearby catcher droid made an astounding leap to take the catch three inches off the ground.

'Nice one' I said.

'Got any more?' asked the machine enthusiastically, scooting up close to my feet. It was a little metal cylinder with a flashing red light on the top, and had a spindly metal arm with a tiny mitt at the end.

I rootled in my pockets.

'Don't think so.'

'Boo hiss.' I

'Go away, droid,' said the map, irritably.

I found an old matchbox and held it out.

'Brilliant! Go on, chuck it really hard,' the droid said, poised for action.

I spun the matchbox down the street and the droid zipped after it. It was touch and go, but with another full-length dive the machine managed to get its mitt to it. It waved and then sped off down the street towards a leaf falling about a hundred yards away. Two others got there at the same time and there was an audible clang as they made contact, but one of them got it and went bouncing off down the street, waving the leaf triumphantly above its head.

Ten minutes later I turned into Res205M and found Bellrip's block. I was saved from having to case the security door by a gaggle of white-coated men chattering happily about machine code, who held it open for me as they left. For some reason the Natscis all live in single-sex blocks, like huge halls of residence. They marry and stuff, but even then it's a case of sleeping over in the other person's dorm. Seems kind of weird to me, but they're obviously all happy with it. There was a noticeboard in the reception area, covered with leaflets about societies and clubs and a sign pointing to the refectory. I was pretty hungry by then but decided to wait: maybe I could buy Bellrip lunch.

Depressingly, there was no lift, and I had to climb six flights to get up to Bellrip's floor. When I got to his door I pushed the buzzer on the wall for quite a while, but there was no reply. The bastard wasn't in.

Sighing, and trying to work out what to do next, I fished a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a note asking Bellrip to get in touch with me. I left my address, my home vidiphone number, my portable vidiphone number, my transfax number, I even left my star sign. I really had to talk to the guy, and soon: I wanted to be asleep as soon as possible and with all this stress I was going to be awake for days.

I folded the note and bent down to slip it under the door. As I pushed it under, something I hadn't expected happened. The door moved.

I stood up quickly, watching the door as it slowly swung open a couple of inches.

'Er, Mr Bellrip?'

There was no reply. I hadn't been expecting one, really. If he'd been going to respond, he would have done so to forty seconds of doorbell. He wasn't there, clearly.

Casting a glance behind me I nudged the door open a little further and slipped inside, closing it behind me. From the short corridor I was standing in, the apartment looked pretty much the same as Reg Diode's, and was compact to say the least. I coughed loudly, got no response, and took a couple of stealthy steps towards the living-room door. It was slightly ajar and I listened behind it for a moment, but heard nothing. Preparing myself for some top quality apologising if the guy turned out to be deaf, I pushed the door open.

The quality of the light in the room was strange, and it took me a moment to realise why. Bellrip was sitting in an armchair in the centre of the room, his hair sticking up at a crazy angle.

As it turns out, he was deaf. He was deaf because he was dead. He was also blind, because his eyeballs had been burnt out. One leg lay two yards away from the chair. His arms were both still attached to the body, but only by bone. The muscles had been peeled back in strips which hung like limp tentacles from his elbows. The area between his neck and his pelvis was barely there any more. It looked like his body had exploded from the inside, and the walls and windows were painted in blood, dimming the light which filtered into the room. A foot-long portion of intestine lay on the floor in front of him like a tired snake, and the room was liberally sprinkled with blood, small pieces of his insides, fragments of bone and specks of partially digested food. The room smelt like some dark corner of an abattoir which they don't clean up properly, as if someone had staggered in there and vomited blood on a warm day.

I didn't bother to get my gun out. The blood on the walls and windows was dry, and what was left of Bellrip's detached leg was beginning to stain with progressive rot. Even in this heat that meant he'd been dead at least five or six hours.

Carefully picking my way through the visceral debris I made my way round to the back of the chair. Bellrip's hair was sticking up at the back because the bits of skull it was attached to weren't where they were supposed to be. The back of the top of his head looked like a shell three inches across had smashed its way out of it from the inside.

But it wasn't a shell that had done this, it was a hand, and I realised what I should have known some time ago. What had been there, all the time, ignored by me because I wanted to. Suddenly, horribly, pieces started to fall into place like a film of glass shattering shown backwards. I knew whose hand had done this, and I knew who was after Alkland. It couldn't be denied any more, however impossible it was.

It was Rafe.

I got to Ji's Bar just after four. I was moving as quickly as I could, but it was a hell of a long way round because I couldn't go through the Centre, and the Red mono was fucked. I walked quickly down the disaster streets, glad that I was wearing black. The street life got the hell out of the way, which was good. I would have had to shoot them if they hadn't.

I started seeing Ji's emblem on walls about a third of a mile earlier than the last time I'd been in Red. Clearly the two brothers were proving a bit too much for the other gangs to handle. A lot of the new territory was heavily damaged, the street in places all but impassable with shell craters and the street lighting even patchier than normal.

Once I was definitely in Ji's patch I got my Gun out and carried it loosely, making sure that the emblem on it was visible. The streets were more crowded here, and noisy with the sound of fighting and occasional recreational gunfire. Prostitutes lined the pavements so thickly I had to walk in the road. The area looked like a perverted boom town, which I guess it was: the stronghold of the most dangerous bastards in a dangerous Neighbourhood.

BarJi was thumping with life, the rock music pumping out of it deafening from a hundred yards away. The street outside was the most crowded yet, and I had to shoulder my way through it, waving the Gun at anyone who got uppity. The combination of that and the set of my face, which was probably pretty grim, got me through.

I pushed my way into the bar and looked around for signs of Ji or Snedd. I couldn't see them at first because the bar was packed wall-to-wall with ranks of sweating Dopaz-drones swaying in the orange light, goading the stage performers on with guttural obscenities. Someone threw a broken bottle at the stage and it caught one of the girls across the face. As always, the girl had long black hair, black hair like a flood. She staggered and fell, but then got up again, blood streaming out of a cut on her forehead. The crowd cheered.

Then I saw them, sitting bulkily at a table across the other side. Fyd and another bodyguard sat at a table behind the two brothers. They were keeping a careful eye on the proceedings. Crunt launchers within reach just in case things got even further out of hand. I edged round the walls of the room towards the table. A drone snarled at me as I obscured his view of the stage, and shoved me hard against the wall, but I pushed the muzzle of the gun into his neck hard, finger squeezing the trigger, and he got the message.

'Stark, hey, what the fuck are you doing here?' shouted Snedd cheerily.

'What's wrong?' asked Ji, getting the picture instantly.

'Can we go upstairs?

Ji waved at Fyd to stay where he was, and I followed Ji and Snedd to the back of the room, the two brothers cutting through the crowd like a chainsaw through butter.

It was a little quieter upstairs, but not much. A good deal of the music from downstairs filtered up through the floor, and the volume was topped up by the regular screams of people having bad Dopaz; rides in the rooms down the corridor. One of the screamers got louder and louder and when he reached a pitch there was the sound of a shot and then the noise cut off with a gurgle. A member of; Ji's staff came out of the room a moment later carrying the body and tossed it down the chute which would dump it in the street round the back of the bar. The screams continued from the room he'd left and he went back in, raising his eyebrows at us in passing.

Snedd shut the door behind us and Ji passed me a jug of alcohol. I took a long, long drink and passed it back.

'So,' Ji said, seriously. 'What's happening?'

'Before I get into that, what did you try to talk to me about?'

To warn you. Someone's looking for you.'

'Who?'

'We don't know,' said Snedd. 'That babe you worked for called Ji a couple of days ago, after you'd got Alkland out.'

'Where was she calling from?'

'The Centre.'

'Did she sound all right?'

'Yeah, in a can-do kind of way. Said you guys had kind of an exciting time in Colour.'

'We did.' I grinned, relieved to hear that at least Zenda had got home safely.

'She told us the deal with Alkland. Heavy'

'Yeah.'

'Where's he now?' asked Ji.

'Wait: what's this about someone looking for me?'

That's it. Just that. When we levelled Shen Chryz's territory we brought him back here, in case he had any stray information we should know about.'

'Did he?'

'Nan. Just that someone had been trying to find out where you were.'

'Something else, Stark' said Snedd. 'You remember when I saw you last, I said someone had been trying to find out how to get back into Stable?'

'Yeah'

'Can't have been Alkland, can it?'

'No,' I said. I'd already realised that. With his computer trick up his sleeve there was no reason for Alkland to have kicked around in Red trying to find a way in.