Border Princes

FOURTEEN

Mr Dine vaulted off the burnished roof shell of the Millennium Centre and landed on the dry boards of the Quay below in a single bound.

He landed in a shock-absorbing crouch and slowly rose upright. Combat modulated, flicker-fast, skin-sheathed in battledress, he read the area. Environment appraisal, a super-vast sensory processing that took barely a nanosecond from initial data-capture to final tactical assessment. The gleaming finger of the water tower smelled especially hot to his elevated senses. He shot towards it.

Visitors and tourists milled around the area, all the way down Roald Dahl Plass, chattering in the colourless sunlight and taking pictures. None of them saw him, even though he passed amongst them. None of them recorded him in their pictures, even though he was right there in shot many times.

This was because he was simply moving too fast. Hyper-acceleration zigzagged him in and out of the bustling traffic as if he was occupying an entirely separate time scheme. The people were slo-mo to him, swaying, lumbering, cumbersome. It was also, partly, because he was invested for war, and the matt-grey sleeve of the battledress shrugged off light and colour like smoke.

In extremis, Mr Dine had switched to autonomous running. The upload was conspicuously unreliable, unacceptably compromised, and the fix undefined, so Mr Dine had muted the upload’s data stream. He didn’t need the confusion. For the sake of the Principal, he knew he had to act logically, and make the sort of executive anticipatory decisions all loyal bodyguards of the First Senior were expected to make when it came to the crunch.

This was the crunch. In selecting him, him out of all the exalted First Seniors, for this tour of duty, the Lord of the Border had placed enormous trust in Mr Dine, and Mr Dine wasn’t about to betray that trust. Protect the Principal. Protect the Principal. All other issues were secondary. That was why he had been inserted onto the Earth.

He was buzzing, his body singing with the immense power the investment had bestowed upon him. This was his purpose, in its purest, most ineluctable form, these brief, shining moments of performance. This was the fleeting joy of being what he was, what he had volunteered to be. This was why he had been made the way he was.

A selfless, devoted soldier. An implacable force. An instrument of war. There was nothing on Earth in this time that could match him, like for like. Nothing from Earth, at least.

There were plenty of things from elsewhere that might give cause for concern.

A blink, he arrived beside the base of the water tower. Clear rivulets of water poured down the steel flanks of the naive human monument. Tourists laughed and backed off as the Bayside wind carried the spray out at them. None of them saw him.

None of them except a three-year-old boy, pulling on his mother’s hand as the family posed for a father’s Kodak digital. In Mr Dine’s experience, very young human children sometimes possessed a knack of subtle intuition that adulthood stole away. The boy stared at him, goggle-eyed.

‘Mummy, who is the grey man?’

‘Look at Daddy, Kyle. Look at Daddy and say cheese.’

Mr Dine raised a grey-thorned finger to his lips and winked at the boy. The boy’s eye’s widened further and he grinned.

Mr Dine turned and took a deep breath. He could smell the technology buried under the flagstones. It reeked, hot and sharp, like cooking pheromones. Down below, deep under the Bay, exotic tech screamed to him like a newborn baby.

Autonomous running. Executive decision. Assess the options. Another nanosecond of deep reflection. He had no true fix on the Principal, so he had to work with the data available. If he couldn’t find the Principal himself, he could locate and neutralise that which was threatening the Principal.

The water tower. His systems lit up, hungry.

Here. Here.

There was a lift mechanism under one of the paving stones, cloaked by a perception filter. Interesting. Unexpected. He nodded his head. A simple hindbrain connection with the lift’s systems overwrote all the security measures.

Mr Dine began to descend as the lift kicked in.

He was lowered into a dank, twilight place, a lair of some sort. Gloom, concrete, old tiling, the background smell of the under-dock vault. The sleek flanks of the water tower extended down into the place, down through ground level into a recirculatory basin. Mr Dine tasted the heat of a network of high-level human computational systems and allied electronics: live work stations, woven sheaves of fibre-optic trunking. Very impressive, by local tech standards. Primitive to him.

He also read other things. Dead things, dormant things, slumbering things, dreaming things, things encased and secured and screened and boxed and locked away. A treasure trove of non-human artifice that had no business being either here or now. He approved of the way it had been so diligently sequestered.

But not all of it had been. Something was loose and live, aware and predatory. The lift had about five metres still to descend, but Mr Dine stepped off it. He landed on the grille decking with a quiet clank, and walked across the basin board-way towards the concrete platforms where the work stations flickered and hummed.

Two humans lay in a tangle of limbs on the floor, twitching, comatose. The loosed thing, the exotic tech, was a tiny object, revolving in a field of blue light. It felt him, read him and began to mew and wail in his mind.

Mr Dine’s systems were robust enough to deny its initial advances. Shield buffers rose automatically to screen him. He assessed. No match. The technology was not known to the First Senior data-archive. He filed his findings for future reference. Product of an unknown species, origin/manufacture unknown. Tech level sixty-plus. Powerful suggestion fields. Hazard (type 2) grade persuasion/manipulation protocols enabled by a quasi-sentience. Aggressive intercourse.

He took another few steps towards it. The tiny object began to spin more rapidly. To his surprise, his outer sets of shield buffers impacted suddenly and shattered. The inner sets held. Mr Dine accessed reserve investment and erected a custom barrier shield to bolster his defences.

‘What are you?’ he asked.

It answered in a rattling string of colours, lights and concept impressions. Abstract numbers. It was as swift and ferocious as a hail of gunfire. Abstract numbers. Two blue lights, moving.

Mr Dine winced. His inner shields exploded without warning. Instinctively, he set a second custom barrier behind the first.

‘So, you want to play, do you?’ he asked.

Gwen found herself sitting in her Saab, turning the engine over. The starter motor gagged and wheezed. She flooded it.

How long had she been sitting there? How long had she been trying to-

She got out of the car. She felt like a zombie that barely, just barely, realises it is a zombie. She tottered back into the adjacent warehouse.

James was sprawled on the ground. He looked distressingly dead. The ring of scanners was whirring. She remembered her intention. She’d been trying to drive back to the Hub. The Hub, from where the Amok was calling to her.

‘Oh my God,’ she mumbled. Her head hurt like it had been crushed between cymbals. She could barely walk straight. There was a ringing in her ears.

Her phone. Her bloody phone.

She took it out, opened it upside down, turned it over.

‘Yeah?’

‘Gwen? For God’s sake, help us! We can’t find-’

‘Jack?’

She heard muffled voices, agitation, extraneous noises. Then, suddenly, clearly, she heard the footsteps again.

‘Jack?’

A scream. Toshiko, screaming. Gwen went cold. The repeated booming of a revolver, straining the limits of her phone’s speaker.

Laughter. Satanic, psychotic laughter.

Gwen squealed and hurled the phone away. It bounced across the ground, chipping and cracking.

‘Gwen?’

She looked around.

Jack was standing in the middle of the ring of sensors. He was holding Toshiko to his side with one arm. She was clinging to him, weeping. Jack’s face was drawn and haggard. He was shaking. His hair was lank with sweat. In his right hand, his Webley wavered, uncertain, smoke coiling from the long barrel.

‘Oh my God, Gwen,’ Jack stammered. He sat down on the ground, and Toshiko folded up beside him.

One by one, in sequence, the six stand-mounted scanners exploded, their cases bursting open in clouds of sparks. Two of the tripods toppled. The master control box began to smoke and then caught fire.

Her own brain ablaze, Gwen tried to speak, but nothing came out.

The Amok spun around even more furiously, and then stopped.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Dine. ‘Clever. But I believe I win.’

The Amok rotated left for two turns, then right for three.

‘No, I do not want to play again,’ said Mr Dine.

The Amok pulsed out a field of violet sulk.

Mr Dine reached forward and took hold of it. He grimaced as it burned his palm.

‘Still fighting?’ he asked.

It was. Mr Dine cried out as pain flared along his arm and into his head. The last of his custom barriers fell.

‘You are tenacious, but I am of the First Senior. I am not impressed by your spite. I have given you fair warning. Accept the consequences.’

Mr Dine squeezed his hand. The Amok winced and shattered. Mr Dine toppled backwards and sat down hard. It had been tough. Astonishingly tough. Almost a match.

He let the powdered fragments of the Amok slide out of his hand and then began to try healing the grievous damage he had sustained.

Owen woke up. He looked around, aware that he was on the floor with Ianto crumpled on top of him.

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello?’

Something was sitting on the floor next to him. It was the size and shape of a man, but it was matt-grey, its bodywork comprising odd grey thorns and overlapping, segmented layers. A monster.

Owen had seen a fair few monsters in the course of his work. Weevils, for a start. This was altogether more nightmarish. So sleek, so machined, so artfully designed.

He felt funny. Muzzy. Sick. Maybe he was seeing things. Maybe there wasn’t a monster there at all.

The monster turned its extended, streamlined, recurve head and noticed him.

There was an expression on its vaguely human face. An expression of pain and torment. It pointed a long, thorny finger at him.

‘You will not remember me,’ it said, its voice as level and heavy as the speaking clock.

‘OK, fair enough,’ said Owen, and allowed unconsciousness to carry him away again.