Against Gravity (15 page)

“Caroline,” he said gently, “if anyone’s likely to know what’s going on here, I think it’s more probably you than me.”

She stared straight ahead at the street outside. “Well, perhaps that’s true,” she said in a small voice.

“Maybe we need to talk. You never told me why we finished. You never told me your augments had—”

She raised a hand as if to silence him, so he changed tack. “Has Buddy been in touch with you?”

Caroline looked as if her face was about to crumble. “Yes, he has,” she replied, visibly pulling herself together. “I went to Holland, and we met there.”

Kendrick nodded. Holland was relatively tolerant about Labrats. “And?”

“I started
seeing
things just a little while after you did.”

“Christ, Caroline, if you’d only told me—”

“I didn’t
want
to tell you! I saw things, so many things, and Robert spoke to me—”

“Robert is dead.”

The expression on her face was filled with such cold fury that Kendrick looked away immediately. “You don’t need to remind me,” she replied with icy bitterness. “But he
spoke
to me. He’s still alive in some way.”

“Caroline, some very fucked-up stuff is happening around me. Someone tried to blow up Malky’s bar, and earlier today I saw someone – someone who claimed to be a friend of
Buddy’s – get
killed
right in front of me.” He saw the shock on her face. “People are trying to tell me things, and I have to take notice of that. I
have
to
start asking serious questions.” He gestured down the street towards Hardenbrooke’s clinic. “You see that place over there? Somebody told me that the guy who’s being paid to
save my life is in fact out to get me –
why
, I don’t know. Now Erik Whitsett turns up and tells me we’re all –
all
of us – seeing the same damn things in
our dreams.”

Kendrick laughed, aware of the edge of panic in his voice. “But then, maybe we’re
not
seeing the same things, so go figure! I have to get to the bottom of this. I don’t
have any idea where to find Buddy, or even if he’s going to give me a reasonable explanation for what’s going on, so in the meantime I’m just going to go in there and find some
things out. Unless, Caroline, there’s something you really need to tell me.”

He looked at her expectantly. She was pale, trembling, not meeting his gaze. When the words came, she gave a good impression of having to force them. “When we were in the Maze . . .”
He nodded encouragingly. “When they made us . . . I didn’t know that you were down there with him, that you were the one who killed Robert. I didn’t know you were the one that did
it.” Anger crept into her words. “I didn’t
know
you’d killed my brother. And you didn’t even, not ever, not during the whole time we were together, have the
fucking grace to
tell
me, you miserable, pathetic, fucking
bastard
.”

Kendrick nodded again, this time in understanding, and sat back. It had started raining, fat grey drops sliding in miniature rivers down the glass.

“Caroline, none of us had any choice. He would have killed me—”

“And don’t I just wish he
had
!” she screamed, her face contorted with rage. She was weeping now. “He was my brother.”

Kendrick fell silent, embarrassed and suddenly inarticulate, wondering just how she had found out. Buddy, perhaps? But he’d promised never to speak about that. Who else might have
known?

Or had something that looked like Robert, spoke with Robert’s voice and shared Robert’s memories told her?

But at least he knew now why she’d thrown him out.

Kendrick rehearsed the lines in his head.
I had another seizure – two again. I almost died. You have to help me.
What would happen after that was anybody’s
guess, but he had to get in there and find out if McCowan’s ghost had been as right about Hardenbrooke as it had been about the bomb.

He stepped up to the door of the clinic, which had no handle nor any other obvious means for people to exit or enter. On previous occasions he had been peripherally aware of hidden security
equipment scanning him on his approach, and on those occasions the door had simply swung open.

This time, however, he had no appointment.

It was easy to speculate about who Hardenbrooke’s other clients might be. Kendrick was far from being the only Labrat who’d washed up on these shores in dire need of medical
assistance that he could never acquire legally.

Kendrick pushed against the door, but it remained locked. He stepped back and looked over to the nearest windows, rising behind tall railings. Below the railings the ground dropped away to a
basement level.

He looked around to check if anyone was hanging around nearby. Caroline had long since driven off, abandoning him to his fate. He touched the door’s surface again, feeling a tingle where
his hand came into contact with it.

He closed his eyes, sensing the security devices built into the fabric of the door like intricate webs of invisible activity. He moved his hand across the door’s width, letting his
augments trace and follow the pulses of electrical energy there . . .

Several seconds later Kendrick heard a loud
clunk
and the door opened a millimetre or two.

That wasn’t me
.

He couldn’t understand or interpret the actions of his augmentations, but he could
think
about something, and if it had to do with infiltration, assassination or any of a hundred
specifically military applications, his body could find a way to perform it. This was not something Kendrick was proud of or wanted. The price of it, after all, had been grievously high, and it
rarely produced desirable results.

He touched the door once more and this time it swung open easily.

Someone was letting him in.

Kendrick gazed across the familiar hallway: stairs ascended and descended in a tight spiral at the far end. He stepped in and the door closed slowly behind him, shutting off all sounds of the
street.

“Hello?” he called out. There was another door just ahead, on his right. He’d never been through it before. He stepped up to it and pushed. It opened smoothly.

Somewhere behind him he heard a faint tip-tap sound. He glanced over his shoulder to see a security device of a kind he vaguely remembered from some technology-obsessed gridchannel but had never
encountered in real life. It moved across smooth cream plaster on tiny insect-like legs, suspended there by no obvious means. Tiny lenses reflected light as its head swivelled towards him. It was
safe to assume that his every move was now being recorded.

Fine. So be it.

Kendrick walked back out and along to the stairwell, then called Hardenbrooke’s name loudly. He waited for several seconds without hearing an answer, gazing down at the steps curving away
below him.

Fuck it
. He walked back to the door he’d opened earlier and entered to find himself in a room entirely devoid of furniture, equipment . . . anything.

Peeling wallpaper curled down from one corner of the ceiling, and a thin layer of dust coated the white-painted sashes of the windows overlooking the street.

A large empty packing crate stood over to one side, while a greyed-out eepsheet lay in the dust beside it, its internal power source long since dead.

Behind the crate he found a chair, its plastic grey and scarred, the fabric of the seat stained and torn.

This room clearly hadn’t been used in a long time.

Tickety-tap, tickety-tap
. The spider-device had somehow made its way all the way down from the hallway ceiling and around the door frame, following him into the room. Or was there more
than one of them?

Kendrick peered up at it, noting a tiny metallic platform, with a range of minuscule equipment mounted on top, propelled by six cruel-looking jointed legs. It had the smooth metallic-organic
appearance of vat-grown molecular technology. Tiny, perfectly machined gears and joints slithered in perfect accord, shifting to follow Kendrick as he stepped back out into the hallway.

He stood again at the top of the stairwell, watching with a certain degree of foreboding as the device negotiated its way back out of the empty room to continue watching him.

Then he heard it: the distant muffled sound of a smothered cough, inaudible to anyone with normal hearing. It had come from below, from the rooms where Hardenbrooke held his regular appointments
with Kendrick.

He laid a hand on the black-painted banister and went down. “Hardenbrooke?”

Below, the clinic was wreathed in semi-darkness, the leather couch and the apparatus that surrounded it in the centre of the room resembling some esoteric high-tech sculpture. Next to them stood
the familiar wheeled tray of surgical instruments and sprays.

Someone
was here – Kendrick had heard them. So why were they hiding?

At some point in the past the basement area had been partitioned to allow the addition of a small office, the interior of which Kendrick could now see through a long rectangular window with
half-closed shutters. He stepped towards it, seeing nothing more exciting through the glass than the corner of a desk and a tall steel cabinet.

He entered to find two large wooden crates stuffed with cardboard folders, as if Hardenbrooke had been in the process of packing. Ever since the LA Nuke, people paranoid about losing data
through EMP weapons tended to keep hard copies of everything. Considering Hardenbrooke’s own history, it wasn’t surprising that he shared this tendency.

Okay, nothing like a little breaking and entering.
Whoever had coughed could wait. Kendrick scanned the contents of one cardboard folder and recognized a name: Erik Whitsett.

If his heart had still been working, it would have skipped a beat then.
There’s a name that keeps cropping up
. He dug around some more, coming up with yet more names. Some he
didn’t recognize, others he did. All of them Labrats – but maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

Kendrick dug further down, finding more names. Again, one or two of them were recognizable. He started on finding Caroline’s name listed there. But Caroline had never received any
treatments from Hardenbrooke. Or had she? And why hadn’t she told him about it in that case?

He studied her file.
Augmentations in highly accelerated state
, he read. A polite euphemism for turning rogue. More names, soon scattered across the floor. Then – Buddy Juarez, with
exactly the same words:
Augmentations in highly accelerated state
.

He couldn’t be sure about any names he didn’t recognize or was uncertain of but he was willing to bet every last one of them had passed through Ward Seventeen, down in the Maze. He
studied more records: every one of them dead or dying from their rogue augments.

Just outside the office, something moved with a metallic click. Kendrick froze, then carefully stepped back out into the main area.

Tickety-tack, tickety-tack
.

He glanced up towards the shadowed ceiling, catching the glint of light on a lens . . .

And then it was on him.

It landed right on his upturned face, tiny needle-legs catching onto his cheek so that he yelled with pain and surprise. He reached up to rip it off, but even the gentlest tug, he knew, would
take skin and flesh away with it. The tips of the device’s legs were icy, and a numbness began to spread through his face, his mind. And then Kendrick slid into blackness, lost in a deep,
fathomless night.

Consciousness seeped back only slowly.

At first Kendrick saw only dim shapes, their edges blurred. Then his eyes focused more clearly. He did not like to think too deeply of the biosynthetic tendrils that sprang alert along his optic
nerves, allowing his vision to snap into such remarkable, almost surreal clarity. In this state, he was entirely capable of discerning the tiniest cracks in the plaster ceiling above his head. It
gave him a sense of sharing his skin with some other being whose intent and purpose he could not really know – which was maybe as good a definition of Labrat augmentation as any.

He couldn’t yet move, although a distant tingling and dull itch was beginning to make itself felt in his limbs and face. Apart from that, every muscle was frozen. When he tried to speak,
only a thin mumble passed through his lips, which refused to part.

Kendrick could hear someone talking upstairs. He was picking up sounds better – and from further away – than he ever had before. Rather than being good news, this was instead an
indication of how unstable his augmentations had become, altering his flesh and his nervous system in new and alarmingly unpredictable ways.

At first, the words from above were muffled, but his augments filtered and boosted the sound of them until he could listen with relative ease. Even with such enhancements, however, only a small
part of what Hardenbrooke was now saying made sense.

“I don’t give a shit,” he overheard. Was Hardenbrooke speaking over a line? Then a brief exclamation, as of someone else about to raise an objection: so Hardenbrooke was not
alone there. “We’ve
got
to get rid of him. Smeby must have told him something, otherwise why would he sneak around like this?”

Another voice: “Maybe because you
let
him in to go wandering around? Jesus, how paranoid can you get?”

Malky?

A pause as Hardenbrooke’s voice faded then came back again, as if he was moving about on the upper floor. “. . . Take care of making sure he’s still out, okay? So if I leave
you here, sure you can’t screw up?”

Soon cautious footsteps echoed down the basement steps, sounding to Kendrick like dustbin lids being smashed against a wall.

Kendrick’s body tingled as he imagined the machine-growths entwined with his flesh and blood filtering the drug out of his body according to some complex set of heuristic rules, as if his
body was a fortress and the nanites its defenders.

Which possibly explained why the tingling sensation grew exponentially for several seconds before Kendrick found that he could both feel and move his arms and legs again.