Against Gravity

The older of the two had steel-grey hair in an untidy side-parting, and Kendrick automatically found his attention focusing on him, although he had no idea if the younger man – broad-chested like a football player, short hair bristling from a pink scalp – might even be his superior.

"Mr Gallmon?" asked the older one, and Kendrick nodded automatically. "We were wondering if we could speak with your wife."

"Excuse me, who are you?" Kendrick asked, his mind still foggy with sleep. A thought crossed his mind and he became suddenly more alert. "Has there been some kind of accident?"

The two men exchanged what Kendrick recognized as a significant look. "It's a matter of some urgency," continued the older one.

"May we come in?"

"I'm not sure, I-"

The younger one had a hard, bright blue-eyed stare that Kendrick found he preferred not to meet. "Mr Gallmon," he said, "it would help if you cooperated with us fully."

"You haven't told me who you are." Kendrick looked more closely at their uniforms, hoping for some way of identifying them. He could see nothing he recognized, but he became aware of the holstered guns at their sides.

"Has Amy Gallmon been here today?" the older one asked. "It's important that we speak with her."

The thought of slamming the door on them flitted through Kendrick's mind but he dismissed it, thinking: This is ridiculous. I haven't done anything wrong. "I think I'd like to speak to her first, before I say anything more. Or to a lawyer. Do the police know you're here?"

"We can arrange for that later. In the meantime, it's extremely urgent that we find her."

Kendrick stepped back from the door, glancing quickly over his shoulder and into the living room. He'd left his patchphone there – a standard skin-contact unit, the size of a fingernail. "Tell me why you're here, or I'm calling the police – and my lawyer after that."

And then something very significant happened, something that made Kendrick appreciate that whatever world he'd grown up in it had disappeared for ever. The older of the two men smiled and nodded almost paternally before giving a fractional nod to his companion who stepped forward, at the same time unfastening the flap of the holster at his side. Kendrick watched the younger man's hand drop onto the butt of his gun.

The older man spoke again. "Sir, I should advise you that your wife is wanted on suspicion of treason. Under the current emergency legislation we are required to bring you too in for questioning. Get your jacket or anything else you think you may need, but we don't have time to fuck around. I'll give you one minute to get yourself ready."

Kendrick remembered that the kitchen door at the back of the house was still open. He had a brief fantasy of making a break for it out through the back door and losing himself in the narrow alleyways between the houses.

"My daughter's at the care centre," he said numbly.

"That's all right, sir," said the older guy. "We've already sent someone to pick her up."

And then Kendrick realized just how bad things were.

A few minutes later Kendrick allowed himself to be thrust into the back of a van bearing military markings. He was not handcuffed, but a steel-mesh grille separated him from the two other men. Surprisingly enough, he realized that he wasn't even particularly scared. Somewhere along the line, somebody had clearly made a terrible mistake. Everything would work out fine in the end, and he'd come home – and one day he'd even laugh about it.

Thoughts like these circled through his mind like a kind of mantra. But, every now and then, he looked down and saw his hands clenching, pain stabbing in his wrists as the muscles flexed spasmodically. He had to keep his wits about him, whatever happened.

The younger soldier leant forward in the passenger seat and switched on a radio. There was a wheel in the front of the vehicle, giving the option of manual control. Kendrick favoured a manual drive himself, even though it was a lot more expensive and you wound up with a bigger battery drain: he preferred having control over his driving, enjoyed the ability to make split-second decisions and choose to drive down one road rather than the other. You didn't get that advantage with programmable destinations.

The hands of the man in the driver's seat weren't on the wheel, though. The truck was driving itself, blindly slipping along on its tarmac ribbon. Popular music rattled out of hidden speakers, synthesized shamanpop chants over a three-quarter beat, heavy on the bass. The music faded and an obviously digitized voice began speaking, reading the news. Something about Los Angeles…

Kendrick moved closer to the grille, listening as words like "President Wilber", "terrible tragedy" and "holocaust" caught his ear, although the radio volume was down too low for him to hear well. Although the engine was silent there was a light drumming of winter rain on the roof of the truck that made it hard to pick out what the voice was saying. He caught more phrases: "… scene of this terrible national disaster", and "… nation in mourning".

He remembered now how he'd been unable that morning to get his subscription eepsheet newsfeeds to update properly. What the hell was going on?

"Hey," he said – and then louder, when neither of the two men in the front responded: "Hey!"

The "driver" – the older one – glanced over his shoulder with a bored expression. "What?"

"On the radio – what are they saying? What happened?"

The man smiled grimly. "Maybe you can tell us."

After what felt like a few hours, they took a sudden turn-off onto a long and dusty road leading into distant hills. They were far outside the city now, and Kendrick had been discovering there were almost as many different forms of panic as there were Eskimo words for snow. He'd done numb panic, angry panic – when the older of his two captors had threatened to stop the van and beat the shit out of him if he didn't shut up – and despairing panic, which took up most of his time and convinced him that he was being taken off to be shot on some desolate highway, like the unwitting protagonist of a Kafka novel.

Now he was just waiting to see what happened next. With the growing sound of jet planes overhead, he surmised that they were approaching some kind of military airbase. The van pulled in suddenly to a wide expanse of grey tarmac. The back doors were yanked open and Kendrick was lifted down, blinking, into bright afternoon sunlight, the air still fresh from the recent rain. His captors kept one hand each firmly on his shoulders.

He could see long low sheds of brick and corrugated iron, while ranks of jeeps stood parked between white lines painted on concrete. He looked up to see a helicopter rapidly descending on the far side of one of the sheds. The whole place was filled with the sound of men and machinery on the move: soldiers were everywhere, but Kendrick was fascinated to see other people in civilian dress standing beside vans identical to the one he had been brought in.

His guards guided him into one of the sheds. He saw long tables set up inside, and yet more civilians waiting silently. Somehow, seeing others here gave him comfort. They were all seated on rows of cheap plastic chairs at the rear end of the shed, under the eyes of perhaps half a dozen soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders. These guns didn't have the bulbous snub-nosed muzzles that characterized the electric stun weapons used by civilian police, so Kendrick could only assume they were the kind that fired real bullets.

With a terrible shock, Kendrick understood for the first time that if he tried to escape they would probably shoot him. As insights went, it was profoundly depressing. While his two guards marched him over to join the rest of the civilians, he glanced over at the long tables nearby. Rows of soldiers sat behind them, each with a gridcom terminal and eepsheet within reach. They were engaged in interviewing a male or female civilian, behind each of whom stood another armed serviceman or servicewoman.