Against Gravity (14 page)

Tears came to Kendrick’s eyes: Stenzer was clearly employing a new tactic to get from him that which he did not have to give.

“I don’t have anything. I
don’t
. I’ve told you everything I can, everything about my wife and myself, God knows how many hundreds of times over. I wish I could
tell you something more, but there’s nothing, I swear.”

Stenzer’s expression became grim. “The smallest detail, Mr Gallmon. You might think it isn’t important, but it might be. Your wife was in contact with dissidents and enemies of
the nation. Are you telling me she had America’s best interests at heart when she consorted with the kind of people who would incinerate a city full of innocent people? I have copies of
everything either of you ever wrote and, let me tell you, I have never been so sickened by so much unpatriotic filth.” His voice was rising now.

Kendrick shook his head violently. “Christ, you don’t even know that terrorists caused the field rot! Anyway, the environment’s been fucked for decades, and—”

“
Don’t tell me what to think!
” Stenzer screamed into Kendrick’s face, spittle spraying from his mouth. Until now, it had just been questions, endless questions,
while Kendrick’s mind grew dull from boredom and hunger.

Now, something had changed.

Stenzer struck him hard. It took several seconds before Kendrick understood he had been assaulted. He found himself lying on his back, the chair tipped over to one side, his mouth full of the
taste of blood and iron.

Stenzer loomed above him, his fist cocked as if prepared to give another punch.

“I can’t tell you anything,” Kendrick repeated weakly, falling into his familiar litany. “I’ve told you everything I can, again and again. If there was anything
else, I’d tell you, I really would. But there isn’t. I want to go home.”

Stenzer nodded, his expression hard and inhuman. He walked to the door and opened it. Two guards were waiting outside, ready; they must have been there the whole time. They gripped Kendrick by
the arms and hauled him to his feet, then dragged him back out into the corridor, blood dripping from his damaged face.

“What would you like us to do with him, Sir?” one asked.

“Kill him,” Stenzer replied curtly, closing the door forever.

16 October 2096
Leith Docks

“There you are.”

Erik Whitsett still wore the same woollen coat as when he’d first approached Kendrick outside the Armoured Saint. The same scarf was wrapped carefully around his neck, the collar of his
jacket pulled up to cover his ears.

Kendrick glanced out along the quay. They were standing near where the ships were docked, the air filled with the cries of gulls and the smell of brine. Warehouses and half-derelict office
buildings lined the waterfront. In recent years the area had regained its former notorious reputation, particularly since all the refugees had arrived. Kendrick had lived here himself for a while
when he’d first come to Scotland. Those had been difficult times, but he knew the area well enough to know that they’d be left alone now.

“You seem out of breath. Did you find your way okay?”

“I wasn’t exactly sure where you meant,” Whitsett replied. “I’m not so familiar with these parts, remember?” He coughed up a small cloud of steam into the
chill air. “Sorry if I’m a little late.”

“No problem. Care to take a walk?”

Whitsett made an exaggerated show of looking around him. “Christ, couldn’t you have picked some bar at least?”

Kendrick grinned. “There’s one a little further along, yeah. But if we’re going to talk about Buddy then I’d prefer somewhere where nobody’s likely to hear or see
us.”

“Well, I don’t see any alternative. So, yeah, let’s walk.” They fell into step with each other, the sea at Kendrick’s left shoulder.

“You come down here a lot, don’t you?”

Kendrick smiled. “From time to time, yes. This is where I first arrived on these shores.”

“On one of the ships?”

“Yeah, in the early years of the war. Cargo ships came across, carrying thousands of us once the rioting spread to the East Coast. And then the Legislate navies tried to run a blockade to
stop too many of us getting in.”

“Kind of harsh.”

Kendrick shrugged. “What’s it like back over there these days?”

“Same as you probably see daily on the news. Used to be the rest of the world that was fighting among themselves, now it’s our turn.” Whitsett turned to him. “I stayed
on, after the Maze. I used to be a counsellor before, so I helped other people cope with what happened to them down there – to try and slow down the suicide rates, sort of. I first got to
know Buddy back then, before he decided to head somewhere south of Mexico with that helicopter of his. And what about you?”

“It was either go one way and try and find my way through a war zone, or head the other way and get on the boat. Then, like yours, my augs turned rogue a little while back, so I had to lie
low.”

Whitsett nodded sympathetically.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Kendrick, “how did you get here without having to go through the usual checks?”

“Private flight, arranged through a company part-owned by a Labrat. It bypasses the usual channels.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Well – remember Roy? Roy Whitman?”

“Yeah, sure I remember him.”

“You worked together, right?”

“Buddy worked for him,” Kendrick corrected Whitsett, “back when he was running all kinds of shit across the US border, both ways. I just sort of . . . tagged along a couple of
times, hoping to pick up a good story.”

Whitsett glanced at him quizzically. “You’re still writing?”

Kendrick shook his head. “Hardly at all. I’m lucky just to have the funds to keep going this long without working, but that won’t last for ever.”

“But you can’t get the work, because nobody wants Labrats around them. Times are getting hard for all of us.”

Kendrick shrugged. “I suppose I should take comfort in knowing that I’m far from being the only one with this kind of problem.”

Whitsett smiled. “Consider yourself lucky. Things are a lot worse in some parts of America than they are here.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. But you didn’t come all this way just to see me.”

“No, there’s other reasons. Mainly, though, Buddy’s surprised he hasn’t heard from you.”

“I remember, you said that. Maybe the question is why did he feel the need to send you when he could have just asked me himself?”

“Like I said, he’s busy. But he needs your help.”

“He could have called me.”

“It took a little time to track you down. You hid yourself pretty well.”

Kendrick allowed himself a small smile. “Looks like I didn’t do a thorough enough job.”

“But Buddy’s speaking to you now – through me. Los Muertos know about the visions.”

“Bully for them.”

“Don’t underestimate Los Muertos. They’re a lot more dangerous now than they were even a few years ago.”

“Come on,” Kendrick protested. “They’re falling apart.”

“Fragmenting, but not getting weaker. They’ve split in two. One faction considers itself effectively a religion, the other is . . . a little more proactive. They both see us as a
danger.”

“Look, you know I
see
things? And I’ll admit it’s quite something, the idea that I’m not alone in this. All that tells me, though, is that our augs are screwing
with our heads.” Kendrick chuckled. “I mean, what’s new about that? But what I really don’t understand is why anyone would be interested in the specifics.”

“You can’t overlook the fact that the more fundamentalist factions of Los Muertos believe that they gain something from the visions they can experience themselves, once they get
close enough to the Maze. You witnessed it yourself, didn’t you? Buddy told me about your trip into the jungle. What you don’t seem to understand is that we’re all seeing the
same
things, all of us – everyone who survived Ward Seventeen, specifically.”

Kendrick laughed and shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

“I can
tell
you what you saw: a tiny boy with wings like a butterfly. I can tell that just by looking at your face.”

Kendrick felt his face grow hot. “So what? Even if that was true – and I don’t necessarily admit it – what difference would
that
make to me?”

Whitsett shrugged. “We were invited. They must have spoken to you too.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The Bright.”

Kendrick forced himself to calm his breathing. It had been a long time since he had heard that name. “The Bright aren’t real. They’re just a product of the imagination of
someone who became deranged through US-sanctioned medical procedures.”

“Nevertheless they exist. They are real.”

“And Buddy wants to talk to me about this stuff?”

Whitsett took a different tack. “There were four of you, right? You, Peter McCowan, Robert Vincenzo and Buddy Juarez. You were isolated in the Maze and something happened. Something passed
between the four of you.”

“All right, I can’t deny we were kept isolated together,” Kendrick conceded.

“And that’s when Robert first started speaking of the Bright?”

Kendrick sighed. “I told you, Robert was crazy.”

“Was he?”

Kendrick looked away and didn’t answer. “A lot of strange things happened back then. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure what was real and what wasn’t.” He looked back
at Whitsett. “And Buddy’s decided the Bright are real?”

“They
are
real,” Whitsett replied with surprising fervour. “The Bright are offering us a way out, a way to escape. But in order to achieve that, we have to get to the
Archimedes
.”

“The
Archimedes
? Do you have any idea how nuts this all sounds? How would you even get up there, anyway?”

“Launch company run by a guy called Gerard Sabak, sort of your entrepreneur-industrialist type. He was among the batch that came after us, still stuck in Ward Seventeen when we were dumped
in the lower levels. He has a majority partnership in the company, and they specialize in running orbital flights for tourists and industry people, stuff like that. He’s putting everything
together, but a lot depends on whether or not we can avoid outside interference.”

“Right.” Kendrick was impressed, despite himself.

“Look, don’t you ever want to get away from the crap we’ve had to put up with? Like not to have even the good guys chasing after you because, just walking around in the
streets, they’re scared you’ll turn into a nanotech plague on legs? Of course you would.”

“I’m not denying that,” Kendrick replied, feeling angry now. Perhaps Buddy had lost it, started a cult like Los Muertos out there in the jungle, worshipping the ruins of a
military base and the machine intelligences that lurked in every molecule of its lightless corridors. “But the fact is that we have to find ways to cope and stay alive right here in the real
world. And even if you could, what would be the point of going up to the
Archimedes
? Assuming you actually managed to survive the runaway nanotech infesting that thing, you’d be giving
the wrong people an even bigger excuse to blow it – and yourself – out of the sky.”

Whitsett looked out over the water for what started to feel like a long time. Then he turned back to Kendrick. “Look, maybe I need to talk to Buddy. If you really had shared the same
experience as the rest of us, we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation. You’d
know
.”

They had stepped nearer to the water’s edge. The hull of a cargo ship loomed nearby, water lapping gently at its rust-corroded hull.

“Look,” Whitsett said suddenly, “here’s an idea. Maybe we—”

By the time Kendrick saw the speedboat it was too late.

He’d been staring out towards the water while the other man spoke. Whitsett had been facing towards him, his back to the water, so that Kendrick was looking over his shoulder at the
sea.

The speedboat must have come from around the other side of the cargo ship moored nearby. He had been too busy listening to what Whitsett had to say to have heard the buzz of an approaching
outboard engine.

When the bullet hit Whitsett, the force of its impact spun him around so that he stumbled against Kendrick in the last moments of his life. Blood and brains sprayed across the harbour front and
Kendrick yelled, stumbling away in shock. Bright flashes sparked from the direction of the speedboat. Something hot whined past his ear.

As Erik Whitsett’s ruined corpse collapsed to the ground, Kendrick could see fine grey filaments mixed in with the soft tissues that had previously formed the interior of the
Labrat’s head.

Time slowed down. Kendrick began to run – the motion liquid and dreamlike in his perception. He took a chance, glanced over his shoulder and saw someone in a heavy green slicker standing
up in the now stationary speedboat, taking aim. Suddenly he felt sure that it had been him they’d been trying to kill, not Whitsett.

He ran.

16 October 2096
Outside Hardenbrooke’s clinic

“
Jesus!
” Caroline’s small hands smacked against the dashboard of her car in anger.

When Kendrick said nothing she sighed noisily, staring out at the street around them. People walked by, one or two glancing in their direction, trying to recognize the environment reflected in
the car windows. Kendrick knew it was Caroline’s own design: the streets of 1940s Casablanca rendered in black and white. Since many of the vehicles driving along the street, or parked around
them, had their own custom reflection programs, theirs didn’t particularly stand out. It meant that they could hide from view until Kendrick needed to enter the clinic.

“I could try and explain, but it wouldn’t make much sense to you.” Even as he said the words, it occurred to Kendrick that he’d have a hard time convincing even himself.
Caroline had eventually woken from her catatonic state to find him back in her apartment. No memory of picking up the phone earlier, nor of sleepwalking subsequently: only of waking up to the sound
of his voice.

So he’d left then, with little explanation, and in the meantime had met up with a man he hadn’t seen in years – just in time to watch him die.