The Age of Scorpio (34 page)

They had started life as an elitist gaming clan. Something called an uberguild, apparently. It had taken a while for du Bois to realise that the weapons they were dealing were effectively electronic game pieces for computer games and not real weapons. Even longer to realise that people would pay for these virtual weapons and for high-level characters. This was how the fledgling DAYP had financed themselves. Virtual weapons dealing and organised league game E-sports, where they were known for domination and bullying.

Their first connection to real-world criminality was with a Korean game gang that they contracted out debt collection to. This was also their first connection to offline PKs – player kills.

According to Control, the DAYP recruited from top-echelon game nerds. The super-intelligent, many of them dropouts from top universities. They were recruited online after the DAYP used gameplay to psychometrically measure them, targeting excluded, disaffected sociopaths capable of doing the sort of things that would be required of them. Recently their games had become more sophisticated and capable of influencing people towards such behaviour.

It would almost be funny, except that through dealing in experimental software, hacking, upmarket games discovered via industrial espionage and experimental hardware, the DAYP had come across S-tech and L-tech. Worse, they had learned how to utilise it.

Then the DAYP started seriously hunting for it. They searched the most accurate conspiracy sites, the darkest, dangerous and often most secure parts of the web, looking for info on the tech. Each time they found it, they attempted to replicate it, augment themselves and their technology and then sell it. They were close to controlling the black market in S- and L-tech.

Their dominance of this black market had required a degree of ruthlessness. Initially, influenced by a type of computer game called a first-person shooter, they had used external contractors to do their dirty work and secure the tech for themselves. These contractors were normally security companies who used ex-special forces personnel. However, with access to such a high level of technology, they had started to augment themselves and do their own dirty work with violent enthusiasm.

They were implicated in thefts, murders, rape, slavery and numerous other crimes. Du Bois had seen men given licence to do what they wanted before, but they had not been given the power of near-gods on earth. The DAYP were thought to be based in America, though it seemed that some of them at least were operating in Portsmouth and interested in Natalie Luckwicke.

Du Bois was angry that he had not been briefed on them. Control had told him that his direct experience had made him more useful in dealing with the City of Brass and agents of the Eggshell, though more and more du Bois was starting to believe that the Eggshell was a myth. If they had ever existed they were long gone. It hadn’t been so long ago that the Circle would have never allowed such parasites to get their hands on S- and L-tech. He wished that he had been allowed to deal with these spoilt, evil child fantasists a long time ago.

He got up, poured himself a healthy measure of Scotch and moved to the window. He leaned against the frame, his face lit up by the harsh sodium lights that illuminated the wet concrete and brick of the base. He could see one of the later buildings that had been added to the military facility. Despite being a typically ugly utilitarian design, there was something of the art deco about it. It reminded him of a film he had seen many years ago about a failed utopia. This thought made him smile humourlessly. Beyond that he could see the lights of the city.

Did it matter? Yes. What the DAYP did was wrong. He was not a righteous man, not any longer if even a shred of what Hamad had said was true, but even if the Circle was corrupt they were not unnecessarily cruel. There was no pleasure in the suffering of others. Like every animal they did what they had to, to survive. Though it looked like that was over. If the prodigal had been here it looked like she was dead.

Du Bois took out his own phone. A normal phone. This one wasn’t filled with liquid soft/hardware many iterations in advance of what was thought to be the cutting edge of computer and communications technology. He knew that Control monitored his ‘private’ phone as well. It was more a symbol of separation between his work and what he could only jokingly call a private life.

He cycled through the few names on his contact list and stared at Alexia’s. He put his thumb over the dial key. His work phone sent the text straight to his internal systems, flagged as very urgent. He narrowed his eyes, his vision magnifying the city below him. He could make out the flashing lights from the emergency-services vehicles.

Some of her co-workers had told her that the fish and chip shop on Castle Street, just down from the Colonial Arms, was the best in the city. Beth had practically run down Elm Grove to Campbell Road, where Uday and Maude’s flat was, to stop the three fish suppers she’d bought from getting too cold.

It was a funny thing about Portsmouth and Southsea that Beth was coming to realise. Perhaps it was because it was an island and space was limited, but it didn’t seem to be a case of good neighbourhoods and bad neighbourhoods, it wasn’t even a case of good streets and bad streets. It was more good house, bad house. Everyone was mixed in together. Students lived next to ‘nice’ middle-class families, who lived next to drug dealers and other career criminals.

With a can of one of the better bitters, the fish and chips had tasted amazing to Beth. Uday had looked at the greasy food with some disdain but Maude had teased him until he’d eaten it.

Both of them had then taken some considerable time to get ready – much to Beth’s amusement. Beth practically had to fight off Maude’s attempt to put make-up on her. The getting-ready process had involved booze from the off-licence on the corner of Outram Road and Victoria Road North, because it was cheaper than drinking in the pub, and a volume war between Maude and Uday’s disparate musical tastes. Beth tended to side more with Maude but only a little.

Then on to a crowded pub on Albert Road. They had to shout to be heard, and spent the first hour standing up until Beth managed to intimidate some kids off a table, much to Maude’s embarrassment and Uday’s amusement. Several rounds in, Beth had stopped worrying about how much of the money that Ted had given her she was spending and how she didn’t recognise any of the music, and was starting to believe the fiction of normality she was trying to construct.

Beth was studying the wooden panels on the wall, each filled with pictures of butterfly statues, girls with rabbit heads, VW Beetles . . . They were odd but Beth was slowly coming to the conclusion she liked them. She liked that someone cared enough to take the time to decorate the pub like this. Though she wasn’t sure it justified the price of drinks in the place.

Beth had noticed Maude get a few looks and there had been whispers behind hands. Maude had pretended not to notice. Uday had looked relieved when some drunk arsehole came over to the table and asked Maude if she was the porn girl, and Beth had been the one to see him off with some serious threats. Beth guessed Uday usually had to do that. She suspected Uday’s comments would have been more cutting.

‘. . . and then we can find a nice girl for Beth.’ She hadn’t been paying any attention, but the sound of her name broke into her art appreciation.

‘I’m not a lesbian,’ she said just a little too loudly, getting some looks of amusement from nearby tables. She was a little pissed off but saw Uday was smiling mischievously.

‘Are you sure? Then why’d you dress like one?’ he asked.

‘Stop it!’ Maude scolded him.

‘Perhaps clothes and make-up and stuff aren’t as important to me as they are to other people.’

Uday clamped his hand to his heart dramatically. ‘Oh my gosh, you are so right. I am so shallow. I shall immediately change my ways and start wearing dowdy things. What is that, homeless chic?’

Beth felt herself colouring. She hated conversations like this. She flicked Uday a V-sign.

‘Don’t mind him,’ Maude told Beth between giggles. ‘He’s just being a bitch.’

‘He certainly is,’ Beth muttered.

‘Oooo! I know!’ Maude said, grinning and clapping her hands. Beth was watching the young goth with suspicion. ‘Makeover!’

Uday’s eyes widened with glee. Beth suspected it was more out of pleasure at her discomfort than sharing Maude’s genuine enthusiasm.

‘Maude, what a marvellous idea! It’ll be like a gruff Yorkshire
Pygmalion
!’

Beth shifted defensively, like she was getting ready for fight or flight.

‘I will beat up both of you,’ she warned. Mostly joking.

‘Darling, not everyone can be as pant-creamingly beautiful as the likes of Maude and I,’ Uday began. Maude smiled graciously at Uday, who gave her a mock bow in return. ‘But with some effort even the dowdiest caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly.’ Uday considered his own statement while studying Beth. ‘Well, a beautiful moth anyway.’

Uday was enjoying Beth’s discomfort but Beth didn’t like where it was taking her. She had never liked the way she looked. Neither had anyone else, so it seemed, so she had made it unimportant to her.

‘Look, the whole being-pretty thing, it’s really not me. That was more Talia’s kind of thing,’ she said, then turned away, taking a mouthful of her drink. Uday looked awkward, apologetic, Maude concerned. Then Maude smiled again.

‘I think you’re pretty,’ she said. Her apparent sincerity almost made Beth believe her.

‘And I concur. There is beauty there, no doubt, though we may need to dig deep to find it.’ Beth gave him the finger this time. ‘But I am, after all, the archaeologist of gorgeousness.’

From all over the pub came the sound of bleeping as people received text messages almost simultaneously. Uday’s phone sounded. He took it out of his pocket, a look of concern on his face. He opened the text. In the distance they could hear the sound of sirens.

‘What is it?’ Beth asked as Uday read the message, his face darkening as he did so.

‘Someone’s just blown up Weightless,’ he said. Horror crept over Maude’s face.

‘Weightless?’ Beth asked.

‘It’s a club on Guildhall Walk,’ Uday said quietly. ‘We’ll know people who were there tonight.’ A pall was settling over the pub.

‘It’s happened again, hasn’t it?’ Maude said. Beth looked at her. ‘It’s like what happened to Talia.’

‘Maude, we don’t know. Anything could have happened.’

‘How do I get there?’ Beth asked.

There was rubble and a hole in the shadow of the neoclassical Guildhall where a building used to be. The hole was illuminated by the multiple flashing lights of numerous emergency vehicles and inhabited by police, ambulance people and fire officers, all of them vastly underqualified to deal with the situation.

Was this how it started?
du Bois wondered. One small morsel at a time.
No, this was too localised, too specific
. He tried to murder the feeling of hope; he wanted to connect this to the prodigal. It was too much of a coincidence for there to be two incursions in such a short period of time.

He supposed he should do something. Find out who was in charge and throw some weight around. At least get them away from the hole before they dosed themselves with lethal levels of cosmic radiation, though it was probably too late. They were in there because they were hoping for survivors, trying to help people.
Sometimes we seem worth saving
, he thought.

Control would start putting the cover story in place. Another terrorist incident. He felt sorry for whichever community was the scapegoat this time around. There would be response teams on their way from Porton Down to seal the area. He already knew what they would find.

If Natalie wasn’t dead, then he needed to find her. He looked around the street. There were a number of CCTV cameras. Du Bois sent instructions to his phone. If the CCTVs were attached to the net in any way, he would be able to download the footage and run it through sophisticated intelligent facial-recognition software. Moments later he received a message saying that nobody fitting Natalie Luckwicke’s description had been anywhere near the club for the last week. Du Bois sighed, though he had known that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

He turned to look at the crowd. Many of them were drunk or high, clubbers evacuated from the clubs along Guildhall Walk. A lot of them were sailors, du Bois guessed. Something caught his eye – someone backing into a narrow alleyway between one of the pubs and a Chinese restaurant. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it except the figure moved furtively, suspiciously, and there was something off about it. Something about the glimpsed figure suggested that it was misshapen in some way.

Du Bois ran to the alley, drawing looks from some of the assembled police. The passage ran for about twenty feet, ending in a high fence with a gate in it. The fence was topped with broken glass. Du Bois tried the gate. It was locked. Feeling slightly absurd, he drew his pistol and kicked the gate in. It led into a small courtyard at the back of the restaurant. Some of the restaurant’s employees came out of the open back door to look at him but said nothing when they saw the gun.

Du Bois shook his head and returned to the street. Scanning the crowd again. Disconcerted. Then he found at least one face in the crowd that he recognised.

Uday and Maude had gone home. Maude hadn’t wanted to add to the chaos at the scene. They would use social networking sites to try and find out if the people they knew were okay.

Beth had circled the taped-off police perimeter trying to get the best view. She’d ended up leaning on one of the lion statues on the steps that led up to the Guildhall itself. She’d watched the blond man run into the alleyway and then reappear moments later with a gun in his hand. The man had been scanning the crowd. He stopped as he looked in her direction. Beth felt like he was staring at her, though she thought she was too far away for him to make out her features. Nevertheless she ducked behind the statue of the lion.

‘I think your sister’s been here, don’t you?’ The bag lady’s face was inches from Beth’s. Sweat, piss, stale smoke and cheap alcohol emanated from her. Beth’s face crumpled in disgust. It was the same woman she’d seen on Pretoria Street.