Rod Rees - [The Demi-Monde 02] Page 2

  ‘That is sedition, CitiZen,’ came the response. ‘You will know that the Charter of Responsibilities has been suspended and thus, by your own words, CitiZen Aroca, you condemn yourself as an Enemy of the Revolution and therefore a cat’s-paw for that most insidious of would-be dictators, the so-called Doge Catherine-Sophia of Venice.’ The door handle rattled. ‘Now open the door and come peaceably. I would advise you that I am empowered to use whatever force is necessary to oblige you to accede to the terms of this lettre.’

  ‘And I should warn you that I will not yield to a lackey of the forces of oppression. When Maximilien Robespierre, Godfrey de Bouillon and Tomas de Torquemada’ – automatically Odette made the sign of Mannez across her chest as she intoned the names of the hated Gang of Three – ‘persuaded the Senate to declare UDI, they made themselves enemies of ImPuritanism. Their attempt to impose UnFunDaMentalism upon the Medi is symbolic of their Dark Charismatic intentions.’

  ‘Is that your final word, CitiZen Aroca?’

  ‘No, this is. Fuck off.’

  ‘That’s two words.’

  ‘Try “Bollocks”, then. I am not going to bandy words with you, a reactionary agent of repression.’

  ‘I was an agent of oppression just a moment ago,’ observed an obviously confused Chief Inquisitor Donatien.

  ‘Oppression, repression: it’s all the same,’ snapped a rather testy Odette, who could never quite remember which was which.

  ‘Break down the door.’

  A nail-studded boot smashed into the door, shaking it to its hinges, but the door was so heavy and the wooden beam barring it so strong that it held firm. The Quizzies must have realised that kicking at the door was a waste of time, as the next, very much heavier, blow was delivered by what Odette suspected to be a sledgehammer.

  Knowing that the door wouldn’t stand long against such punishment, and that she was now fighting for her life, she hauled one of her pistols out of her belt, cocked it, took careful aim at the middle of the door and fired. For an instant she was blinded by the pistol’s muzzle flash as it scorched the darkness, and choked by the stench of cordite smoke. She was also deafened: such was the tiny size of her room that the bang when the gun fired caused her ears to pop. But she wasn’t so deaf that she couldn’t hear the screams of the Quizzie she’d hit.

  The 11mm slug from her pistol had smashed its way through the wood of the door like a fist, the soft lead distorting as it went. What had hit the poor unfortunate Quizzie on the other side of the door had no longer been the streamlined bullet that had left the muzzle of the Ordnance, but a five-centimetre-wide piece of angry shrapnel.

  ‘You UnScrewed cow,’ someone yelled, and then there was another hammer blow against the door, which now, savaged and splintered by the bullet, began to buckle.

  Odette fired again, this time aiming at the wall to one side of the door, where she guessed the Quizzies would be cowering. The simple plaster-and-lath wall offered even less resistance to the bullet than the door. It disintegrated in a cloud of pulverised plaster, the bullet gouging an egg-sized hole before it hit a second Inquisitor.

  ‘Let the bitch have it,’ she heard Donatien shout, and immediately there was a fusillade of firing, the bullets smashing through the wall and whining about Odette’s ears. It was time to get out.

  She fired two more discouraging shots, and then hopped over to the window and eased her considerable bulk out onto the roof. Her Liberté costume offered her precious little protection from the bitter cold of the night and, as her hobnailed boots scrabbled for grip on the snow-slick tiles, Odette could feel her fingers – and other exposed parts of her anatomy – already starting to stiffen and numb.

  Not having much of a head for heights – she had never managed to get above the second level of the Awful Tower – she tried not to look down towards the cobbled street thirty metres below. She almost despaired. It seemed impossible that she would be able to climb over the roof to reach the adjoining building, the tiles were too slippery and the roof too steep. Then Odette had a brainwave. Bracing herself against a gutter, she used her pistols to blast holes though the roof tiles so that the wooden beams beneath them were exposed. These she used like the rungs of a ladder to clamber up the roof. She was almost halfway over it when the man living immediately beneath the roof stuck his head out of his window. It was CitiZen Drumont, her bastard of a landlord, and he didn’t look happy. He gawped, obviously shocked by the vandalism and by the sight of a half-naked Odette Aroca smashing her way across what was left of his roof.

  ‘CitiZen Aroca? Just what the fuck are you doing? You almost blew my fucking head off just now. And who’s going to pay for the damage to my fucking roof?’

  ‘Try the Quizzies. It was you who called the bastards here.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a despicable traitor to the Revolution,’ and with that Drumont hauled a blunderbuss out from behind him and aimed it at Odette.

  Odette didn’t hesitate: she shot him straight through the forehead. She felt no remorse. CitiZen Drumont was a horrible man who had made her life a bloody misery with his constant demands that she pay him the rent on her shitty little room.

  Let’s see you try to collect it now, you bastard!

  Part One

  Paris and the Bastille

  THE EDDIC OF LOCI 1: LOCI AWAKES

  PLATE 1

  1

  INDOCTRANS Headquarters, Fort Jackson

  The Real World: 3 August 2018

  I met with my host and fellow guests for breakfast and, I am obliged to report, I found them, like me, much changed. However, whereas my faculties had been enhanced in a most pleasing manner, theirs, as a generality, had suffered a marked deterioration. Ever the scientist, I made a full and detailed scrutiny of von Frankenstein’s instrumentation, and thus am able to conjecture most confidently regarding the cause of these transmogrifications. The immense electrical field generated by the meteor as it plunged to earth had bathed all those in the house in a pulse of energy of such magnitude that a most profound and fundamental metamorphosis was provoked. Each resident was physically, psychologically and, I would postulate, taxonomically mutated. These changes sat most ill with Sir Augustus Bole, who glowered at the company in a quite ferocious manner. He seemed excessively wan and pale of countenance, and complained interminably that the winter sunshine was inflaming his skin. He went so far as to demand a servant bring him a pair of spectacles with brown-tinted lenses to protect his eyes from the glare of the sun.

  Excerpt from the diary of Percy Cavor,

  dated 1 December 1795

  Although it was only a few minutes past noon, Septimus Bole’s office in INDOCTRANS’s headquarters was swathed in darkness, the heavy drapes tightly drawn, sealing the room from the sunlit day beyond. There were no lights burning in the room and hence it was Stygian dark, only the far-off and heavily muffled noise of the traffic moving ten floors below his office windows signalling that he was still in the land of the living. Bole welcomed the darkness; he hated sunlight, especially when he was in the grip of the Shadows. So, troubled and tormented, he sat alone in the darkened room, fingering the Remington revolver lying on the top of his desk, and toying with a consideration of the joy of release that putting a bullet – a silver bullet – through his brain would bring him.

  The Shadows.

  These were the times when the responsibilities the Bole family had accepted – accepted! – all those long years ago became so heavy that he was unable to function, when he felt himself worn down … crushed … useless. Perhaps once or twice a month, the Shadows would descend on him and he would be obliged to sit paralysed and helpless, alone in the dark, until that feeling of total despair lifted. And during these times he had to wrestle with the pitiless urge to purge himself of his cares – of being a Dark Charismatic in a world of Fragiles – by the use of his revolver.

  The Shadows frightened him. They frightened him because during these black times all the emotions he had so valiantly ignored a
nd pushed aside welled up inside him and threatened to inundate him. The Shadows made him realise that perhaps, possibly, probably, he wasn’t the unfeeling, emotionless, pitiless automaton of an über-genius he wished so desperately to be. During the Shadows, Bole felt human, he felt … fragile. During the Shadows, he was no longer the majestic, the all-powerful Dark Charismatic. During the Shadows, the inferior was in momentary ascendancy over the superior, and Bole became a god humbled by his own contaminating mortality. In those moments, his human side which dwelt cowering in the furthest recesses of his soul came to the fore and reduced him back to being one of the simpering, subservient H. sapiens the Boles had been before their Awakening by the meteor.

  In his desperation to understand his affliction he had scoured the history books, searching for clues, and it was then that he made a startling discovery. It seemed that a high proportion of DClass Singularities – the most powerful of all Dark Charismatics, within whose exclusive fraternity Bole counted himself – had all suffered as he suffered. Stalin, Bonaparte, Cromwell, Alexander the Great and Caligula had all endured the Shadows.

  His studies led him to conclude that for a Dark Charismatic, the two aspects of his being – H. sapiens and H. singularis, Man and Grigori – would always be in conflict and hence his soul would never be at peace. Dark Charismatics were mongrels – a Grigori soul housed in a Fragile’s body – condemned never to be sanguine, ever to be at war within themselves, as one side of their being struggled with the other for mastery.

  It was a worrying conclusion, especially as he had grown older, so the depressions associated with the Shadows had grown deeper. When in the grip of the Shadows, Bole, to his great alarm, was becoming increasingly maudlin and increasingly suicidal. It was as though his residual humanity, sensing that it would never be able to control the Grigori lurking within, sought its own destruction, as, by destroying itself, it destroyed its dark companion.

  In his times of darkness, Bole saw himself as a mouse trapped on a wheel, forever trundling energetically forward, and forever going nowhere. The wheel was, of course, a simple metaphor for his destiny, and he sensed that if he could, just for a moment, step away from his many responsibilities and pressures, then immediately the Shadows besetting his life would vanish. Yet stepping off that wheel was, he knew, impossible: the Grigori would never forgive him if he surrendered. He was their final hope. Bole’s life was defined by this sacred mission to secure the long-awaited victory of the Grigori over the Fragiles … the Final Solution.

  Bole sighed, the despairing sound reverberating around the empty room. As he sat unmoving on his chair, bowed down by the onerous weight of destiny that rested on his shoulders, sweat standing out on his furrowed forehead, eyes tight-closed and teeth hard-clenched, he sensed this would be a particularly testing Shadow Moment.

  Now his anguish was flavoured by the thought that he might fail. He was haunted by the possibility that all his careful planning and conniving might be turned to dust by the unwitting actions of an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl. That he, the great Septimus Bole, had been outfoxed by Ella Thomas; outfoxed by a Fragile, by a female, by a black … by an Untermensch.

  His hand closed around the leather-bound grip of the pistol. He felt its weight and its power heavy in his hand. Unbidden, he flexed his strength and, inch by inch, raised the gun to his head. Now he could feel the comforting coldness of its muzzle hard against the side of his forehead. His finger snaked around the trigger. His thumb flicked off the safety catch. Just one squeeze and he would send a silver bullet into his brain, allowing his kind’s acute argyria to do the rest. Death was just a pull of a trigger away. Freedom from woe required him simply to fire.

  He straightened himself in his seat. No, he would not be beaten. Not when he was so close to triumph.

  Think.

  There was only one thing that could leaven the melancholy of the Shadows, and it was blood. He hated to surrender to these primeval appetites, to these base addictions, but today the Shadows were so very strong. Desperately his fingers scrabbled in the darkness as they unlocked the top drawer of his desk and then searched it for the phial of soul-reviving blood he had hidden there. Finally his fingers found the cold certainty of the glass cylinder. He snapped the top off and sucked down the thick, sweet fluid it contained. Immediately he felt his spirits rise.

  Gradually, his racing heart calmed and he regained control of himself. Once again he had survived the Shadows. The blood had saved him, but the reason for his dive into melancholia remained.

  He conjured a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped it across his brow. ‘ABBA …?’ he said, his voice hardly more than a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Good afternoon, Septimus,’ answered ABBA, in its immaculate imitation of a human voice. It was such a perfect imitation that Bole often forgot that what he was actually talking to was the world’s first – the world’s only – quantum computer. ‘How are you today, Septimus?’ continued ABBA in the same irritatingly equitable manner.

  Why does ABBA always talk in a woman’s voice?

  ‘I am very well, ABBA, very well indeed,’ Bole answered through gritted teeth, the words slurring as he tried to enunciate them through the pain that bracketed his oh-so-elegant mind. He wondered why he was even attempting to lie to ABBA; even in the darkness the infernal machine saw everything.

  ‘I note from your pupil dilation, and your elevated skin temperature, that you are undergoing a rather debilitating bout of neurological dysfunction,’ ABBA observed. ‘I would recommend a dose of one hundred grams of DayRapture, taken immediately.’

  ‘That’s enough chit-chat, ABBA,’ Bole snapped. ‘I don’t want to talk about my health or my psychological well-being, and I most certainly do not want my intellectual faculties pharmacologically impaired. Just bring up a résumé of Ella Thomas’s recent interaction with the IM Manual.’

  ‘As you wish, Septimus,’ crooned ABBA – the machine, as always, indifferent to Bole’s boorishness – and immediately the Flexi-Plexi on the right-hand wall of Bole’s office mutated into a psychedelic swirl of colours and shapes. It settled down to show an eyeVid of Ella Thomas standing in a transfusion booth in the Bank of Warsaw. ‘Ella Thomas interacted with the IM Manual on the eighty-fifth day of Winter, by Demi-Monde chronology, issuing instructions that the Boundary Layer at WBL-1 be made penetrable.’

  Bole felt his headache intensifying. He had taken so much care over the selection of Ella Thomas, finessing her audition so that she appeared to be a strong enough candidate to satisfy INDOCTRANS’s interview procedure, but not strong enough to act as a loose cannon once she was inserted into the Demi-Monde. He still couldn’t understand where he had gone wrong. His analysis of her intellectual, psychological and physical profile had been rigorous. The girl should never have had so much initiative and resilience.

  This was the question he now put to ABBA. ‘How was she able to do this? How was she able to access the IM Manual? My understanding is that it’s impossible for anyone, other than members of the Demi-Monde Steering Committee, to make changes to the Demi-Monde’s cyber-milieu.’

  ‘You are wrong in this surmise, Septimus,’ ABBA corrected. ‘You may perhaps remember, after the incident when a platoon of neoFights was marooned in NoirVille, that the Demi-Monde Steering Committee enacted Emergency Protocol Fifty-Seven, whereby US Army officers who are active in the Demi-Monde and in possession of a security clearance of Level Eight or above may, in conditions of life-threatening potential, make emergency one-hour alterations to the cyber-milieu.’

  ‘But Ella Thomas isn’t a US Army officer.’

  ‘That is incorrect, Septimus. General Peter Zieliéski, in the contract he signed with Ella Thomas, designated her, for the purposes of life insurance and medical benefits, as a captain in the US Army. I am obliged, by virtue of my programming, to adopt the security classification corresponding to the rank that is allocated by INDOCTRANS Human Resources, and in Ella Thomas’s case this is Level Eight.’

 
‘I would like to rescind that classification, ABBA.’

  ‘That is not possible, Septimus. To do so will require the signatures of both parties to the contract. As Ella Thomas is currently in TIS mode, and has granted no power of attorney, such an alteration to the contract’s terms and conditions must await her return from the Demi-Monde.’

  ‘Can I put an automatic non-ratification on any further changes she makes to the Demi-Monde?’

  ‘No, Septimus, unless, of course, you have General Zieliéski endorse this change in operational procedure. Shall I send an eyeMail to the general requesting such an endorsement?’

  ‘No.’ The last thing Bole wanted was Zieliéski becoming suspicious about Bole’s motives regarding the Demi-Monde, or, worse, coming to the belated conclusion that the Demi-Monde had a purpose beyond the training of neoFights.

  Bole sank back even further in his chair and pondered. It was imperative that he stop Ella Thomas interfering with the Demi-Monde. The trouble-making bitch had to be neutralised and neutralised quickly. With the Rite of Transference completed and Aaliz Heydrich physically manifest inside the Real World, the Real World aspects of the Final Solution could begin in earnest. But as achieving success in the Real World was predicated on the success of Aaliz’s father, Reinhard Heydrich, taking full control of the Demi-Monde, and, of course, in refining the Plague Weapon, then anything that endangered these ambitions was a threat to the whole project. Yes … perfecting the Plague Weapon was the important thing … nothing must be allowed to jeopardise the work of the geniuses Bole had assembled in the Heydrich Institute for Natural Sciences in Berlin. The problems his grandfather had encountered in 1946 must not be repeated.