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Qui
His breathing evened out, though he was still outraged. The sect, the awesome gospel he’d given his very life to, was being used as the front of some ultra-spook department. No wonder Ba
“That was me,” he whispered in pride. “Ba
Ba
The taxi drew up in front of one of the hundreds of vehicle entrance bays to Macmillan Station. Qui
The giant arena of corporate urban architecture was almost as empty as the streets outside. There were no arrivals. No streams of frantic passengers racing away from the tops of the escalators. Icons had evaporated from the informationals, which were hanging motionless in the air. Stalls had been folded up and abandoned by their sellrats. A few clumps of listless people stood under holoscreens, cases clutched tightly, staring up at the single red message that was repeated like a parallel mirror image everywhere you looked across the station: ALL VAC-TRAIN SERVICES TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. Even the scattering of ghosts Qui
A group of cops were standing together outside a closed BurrowBurger outlet, drinking from plastic cups, talking quietly among themselves. The loud echo of his footsteps as he walked towards them stirred way too many memories inside Qui
“Excuse me, officer; could you tell me what’s happening here? I have a co
“Check the station bulletin,” one of them said. “Christ’s sake.”
“I, a ha, I don’t have a set of neural nanonics. I qualify for the company loan scheme next year.”
“Okay . . . sir; what we have here is a vacuum breach. The tu
“Thank you.” Qui
I can’t get out, he realized. God’s Brother! The bastards have snared me here. Unless I can get to the other arcologies, His work will remain incomplete. The Night may be held off. And that ca
It was frightening, the way he’d been lulled into a false sense of security. He, of all people. Ever suspicious, ever mistrustful. And he’d fallen into their trap. Yet they must be frightened of him to go to such elaborate lengths. Whoever they were.
He stood outside a taxi for a long time, working out where he should go. In the end, there wasn’t a lot of choice. He was in Edmonton for one person. And only one person would be able to tell him who his real enemy was.
This was the part Billy-Joe didn’t like. He was holding a laser pistol in one hand, there was a heavy-calibre magnetic carbine hanging on a strap round his left shoulder, fitted with a magazine of EE-tipped projectiles, a bag full of EE demolition charges on his right shoulder, codebuster and ELINT blocks on his belt, and a slim omniview band worn like a tiara on his forehead to boost his sight. It was enough hardware to start a war. Kicking the shit out of Courtney’s punters was Billy-Joe’s usual gig. Fast, nasty, and personal. None of this commando shit, where security systems would shoot back at him if anybody in the group screwed up.
But Qui
“This is the place,” said the possessed man who was leading them, and stopped at a blank section of the alley wall.
He gave Billy-Joe the creeps, maybe even more than Qui
The possessed rested his hands on the wall, tensing as if he was trying to push it over. He probably could, Billy-Joe acknowledged. And that was without energistic power. He was at least thirty centimetres taller than Billy-Joe, and must have weighed half as much again.
A door materialized in the wall, made of wooden planks with big black iron bolts and with a sturdy circular handle. It opened silently, letting a wedge of bright light spill out into the fetid alley. There was a long hall of machinery on the other side; bulky turbine casings half-submerged in the carbon-concrete floor. Billy-Joe was looking down on them from at least sixty metres; the door had opened onto a high metal gantry ru
“In you go,” the possessed man ordered. His bass voice rumbled along the alley, agitating the rats.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to use your power,” Billy-Joe said. “The cops know how to look for it now.”
“They can only detect those fireballs we use,” the possessed said glibly. “Listen, kid; Qui
Three of the sensors perched along the top of the alley wall picked up the blasй assurance, relaying it to the intrigued supervisors of North America and Western Europe. The big possessed man had been leaving a trail of glitched processors ever since the little sabotage group emerged from the coven headquarters.
The ever-vigilant AI had datavised North America as soon as the first two were confirmed. A GISD covert tactical team had been dispatched to shadow them within seconds. But the trail had been so ridiculously blatant that North America had alerted Western Europe, and kept the tactical team a block away. Both of the B7 supervisors waited to see exactly where Billy-Joe and the others were heading.