Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (22 page)

**Seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen, tastes like a glimberry.**

**Very good, Ilara. That’s nice. Shall we go on now?**

**Yes.**

Across the mesa, they walked.

They journeyed until the sweetmilk and myobread were gone, and only a few algal wafers remained at the bottom of one flapping, near-empty sack. Harij cast everywhere as he walked and as he slept, without the faintest taste of the resonance he sought.

He had killed Ilara, along with himself.

**I’m sorry, sister. I’m sorry.**

She squeezed his hand, but her eyes were burned shut, and she could barely stumble on. Her skin was cracked and flaky, shiny no more.

He had been so sure the resonance lay in this direction.

**Through here. The gap.**

A broken outcrop stood before them, showing a fang-shaped opening they might be able to crawl inside. The night was ending, and soon the scorching would begin.

Their last day, surely.

He pulled her in with him, held her close, and slipped too easily into sleep.

When the night was at its coolest, something blasted in his mind.

**IT’S ALL RIGHT, HARIJ!**

He winced, trying to focus.

**What?**

**YOU FOUND THE DREAMLODE. IT’S RIGHT BENEATH US, SWEET BROTHER. WAKE UP! WAKE UP!**

Her words pulled him into the waking world.

**Ilara? Ilara!**

Was this her real voice, the flux contained inside her for so long, the thoughts imprisoned in her damaged mind? The potential Ilara made real?

**Where are you?**

**EVERYWHERE, BROTHER.**

He could not see her, though her words pounded through him.

**WHAT YOU SEEK IS FURTHER BACK. SEE?**

Crawling, hurting everywhere but not caring, he hauled himself deeper inside the crack; and finally he found her. Found
it
, the thing that once had housed her.

**IT WAS ONLY FLESH.**

Her body, blackened and cracked, desiccated to oblivion. But if that was Ilara, who was this?

**Dreamlode. This is a dreamlode?**

But he could sense it now, as he revived: deep thrumming resonance, a vast hidden seam of crystal below.

**WE’RE FINE NOW, ALL OF US.**

**All?**

**WE UNDERSTAND BEING TRAPPED. BUT IDENTITY IS SUCH A FRAGILE CONCEPT.**

Some of the flux was redolent of Ilara – of the stunted, unable-to-express-herself Ilara – but some of it tasted ancient; and some it was mere Ideas, snagged by chance, captured from the winds of flux.

**Need to go … Home.**

**YES. YOU MUST, HARIJ. GO HOME.**

But he could not carry her body all that way.

**LEAVE THE FLESH-THING. SAVE YOURSELF.**

There were algal wafers he had saved for her.

**BEAR LEFT DOWN THE RAVINE AS YOU LEAVE, AND YOU WILL FIND A SPIKER BUSH. IT WILL SUSTAIN YOU FOR A TIME.**

**Leave … **

**YOU MUST LEAVE, HARIJ. YOU MUST.**

**I need to … **

**YOUR THOUGHTS ARE TOO TEMPTING, SO FRAGILE AND DELICIOUS. DO NOT TORTURE US MORE, OR WE WILL NO LONGER HOLD BACK.**

**I don’t … **

But he did understand, even in this pain-wracked state.

**I love you, Ilara.**

**WE LOVE YOU ALSO, BUT GO.**

He dragged himself out of the gap.

Harij found the purple spiker bush where the dreamlode mind had told him to look. He sucked on creamy nectar, and broke off leaves to carry with him. Then he worked out which direction to walk in, which way to begin his journey home.

To the punishment he needed the town to give him.

Silvermead swirled in Max’s throat, luxurious and sweet, while the feel of clean clothes against bathed skin was an equal pleasure, along with the lack of pain in his healing body. His chair enveloped him like a soft throne, and the chamber was configured to cosy dimensions, lacking only a fireplace to turn it into a Victorian sitting-room.

Smartfluids threaded the hypodermic layers, giving him the appearance of scarlet veins; while seams and capillaries of the stuff enwrapped his organs, webbed the connective tissues of permysium, enomysium and epimysium, and threaded his muscle fibres: healing, building, repairing. He was under no illusion about the lack of pain: his rehab was just beginning.

‘I regret we’ve never worked together.’ Pavel Karelin’s chair had morphed into a formal, minimalist design. ‘Your reputation is the highest.’

‘Still,’ said Max, ‘I know who you are.’

Clayton and Clara stood by the wall, clearly the junior members here.

‘Likewise,’ Max went on, ‘I know who Ms James reports to.’

‘Then you’ll know the risk I’m running,’ said Clara.

‘I’m grateful for the rescue, if that’s what this is.’

No one asked: what else could it be? The truth was, their operational lives existed in a medium of interpretation, of facts-as-tools, illusions within illusions; and this could so easily be an interrogation taken to a new phase, rendering the subsequent torture devastating.

‘Give us something to justify our trouble,’ said Pavel. ‘That’s all I’m asking for.’

‘I told your two officers how Admiral Kaltberg behaved that day. She came to my office under compulsion, with a graser pistol that part of her brain tried to turn on me.’

To see a Pilot burn out half her own cerebral cortex was a landmark in a life of disturbing events beyond the norm.

‘But you said the pistol was set to explode anyway,’ said Pavel. ‘So why bother?’

‘Insurance, in case I had a bolt-hole. Which of course I did. I regret I couldn’t drag her through with me.’

Whether these people believed him or not, Admiral Adrienne Kaltberg had been the finest Pilot he had ever served with.

‘Accepting this as truth, provisionally,’ said Pavel, ‘who might have implanted such a compulsion in her mind?’

It was time to let them have some point of information, or clam up entirely and wait for the next stage.

‘Admiral Kaltberg was due to retire shortly.’ Max could not tell if this was news to Pavel, but the other two blinked. ‘I believe she had been to see Dr Sapherson.’

‘Mother
fucker
,’ said Clayton.

Everyone looked at him.

‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘Is my bias showing?’

Pavel said, ‘Sapherson will have been acting under orders. That should be clear.’

Clara crossed her arms.

‘So why don’t we ask her nicely about that?’

‘Yeah,’ said Clayton. ‘Very fucking nicely.’

‘Enough,’ said Pavel. ‘So, Commodore. Assume we find that an amnesia-induction session turned into something different. That’s a single datum. What else can you give us?’

Max shook his head.

‘All right,’ Pavel went on. ‘How about this? Clayton went through one of Dr Sapherson’s sessions because of something he learned talking to Carl Blackstone. Later, both he and Clara were part of the group who debriefed young Roger Blackstone, your dead officer’s son.’

‘My
what?
’

But this referred to events that took place while Max was in his bolt-hole, a hidden layer of reality. He had finally come out in the midst of unexpected crowds on Borges Boulevard, showing all the trappings of a state occasion, but with no time to absorb details before officers descended, whirling him through a fastpath rotation into imprisonment.

‘Let me explain,’ said Pavel. ‘And afterwards, you might reciprocate by explaining what you know about this darkness that only a father and son could see. A darkness related to a prisoner locked up for what appears to be years.’

Meaning it was hard for Max, held and interrogated in secret, to claim the moral high ground. He had done the same to others.

Because I had to
.

The traditional excuse for evil.

‘Tell me about Carl,’ he said.

Amid the burning clouds of Molsin, Deltaville was giving birth. The emerging sky-city was called D-2, but only for now. When she had gained inhabitants and developed a culture of her own, a process that might take three standard years or thirty, she would receive a new name by consensus, gaining true identity.

Now, she popped free.

‘D-2 is born!’

Cheers resounded through Deltaville. An anxious team of urban-birth scientists would be aboard D-2 – the public holocasts were not privy to that process – but the focus of holoviews and partying people was the crescendo of celebration overtaking the mother city. In every hall and gallery, every corridor and colonnade, arcade and promenade, abstract holos burst in chaotic colours, while people jumped on the spot, waving their arms, and the quickglass beneath their feet and all around them hummed like a thousand choirs and orchestras, in a heart-rending composition created in the moment. Deltaville was singing of joy and proud fulfilment.

While Roger could not wait for it to end.

Max stared at the trio – Pavel, Clayton and Clara – still not knowing who they were: rescuers and allies, or creatures of the darkness ready to torture him once more.

Time to trust someone
.

He put down his empty goblet and, sustained by the silvermead, considered all he had been told and all he had deduced.

‘If there were a single person behind this,’ he said to Pavel, ‘then who would it be?’

‘Whatever’s going on, it’s too complex to be an individual’s doing.’

‘Agreed,’ said Max. ‘But hypothetically … If there’s a network with a single person ultimately in charge, who are we talking about here?’

Pavel looked at Clara and Clayton.

‘You brought them into this,’ added Max. ‘They need to know as much as I do.’

‘I don’t think anyone knows as much you do,’ said Pavel, attacking the ambiguity.

‘Wordplay aside,’ said Max, ‘if you were to turn Mr Clayton here on Dr Sapherson, and then she spills what she knows about clandestine orders, so you follow the trail back, all the way … where does it end?’

For all the warm decor, the room seemed hard-edged and cold.

Clara said: ‘We’re talking about Admiral Schenck, aren’t we?’

Clayton looked surprised – Max interpreted this as ignorance of Admiralty Council affairs – while Pavel was giving nothing away.

‘That’s one interpretation,’ he said.

Max looked at him.

Time to change your perspective
.

Because it was now an issue of trust; and it was Clayton and Clara who were questioning Pavel’s unstated thinking, while implicitly accepting Max. That was what happened when you played mind games with someone who had lived in the secret world for so long. Then Pavel smiled.

‘I heard you were brilliant, Commodore. Even so, I think people underestimate you.’

‘And the name you were thinking of is—?’

Pavel nodded to Clara.

‘Admiral Boris Schenck, then,’ he said. ‘Clara is right.’

‘Good,’ said Max. ‘I agree.’

All four of them stared at each other. They had just declared the most powerful person on the Admiralty Council to be an enemy of Labyrinth.

‘We can’t move against someone like Schenck,’ said Clayton. ‘For one thing, it’s treason.’

‘You know the counter-argument to that,’ said Max. ‘It’s an old one.’

‘Not if we win?’ Clara smiled.

‘Exactly.’

They met in the cellar, Erik and Ilse and the group they had joined, seven strong including them. Tonight, for the first time, Gérard had brought in the new recruit they had been discussing for weeks: André Wahlberg, originally Belgian, an employee of a pancake house here in Utrecht since two months before the Wehrmacht tanks rolled in.

‘Hello, Erik,’ said Wahlberg, holding out his hand. ‘Good to meet everyone, finally.’

Erik forced his expression to remain businesslike even as he shook hands, despite the flickers of darkness that moved impossibly around Wahlberg’s head like some satanic halo.

‘We could do with some drinks to celebrate.’ Erik made his way over to Ilse. ‘Could you go up to the kitchen and get that schnapps I hid?’