Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

Eleanor always hated coming to Mucklands. It infected aspirations and dignity like a cancer. You could never rise out of Mucklands, you could only fight. The Trinities exploited that ruthlessly.

She caught glimpses of people lurking among the workshops, walking between the towers. All urban predator types, leather jeans, camouflage jackets, and AK carbines. Even though she had a Trinities card, she always called in advance, waited until there was someone to escort her in.

“Do the kids here go to school?” she asked Suzi.

“Yeah. Father makes sure they do. It’s a pain, some of ‘em make good scouts. Who’s gonna suspect a nine-year-old?”

“You’ll cope.”

Suzi gave her a glum look. “I know what you’re thinking. Get ‘em out, fill ‘em with smarts, break the poverty cycle.”

“That’s right.”

“Brilliant. Then who’s going to carry on the fight?”

The fight against their nemesis the Blackshirts was everything for the Trinities, the reason for their existence. Blackshirts were the remnants of the People’s Constables with whom they had fought a running war for nearly a decade along Peterborough’s cluttered frantic streets. And the two were still fighting as if nothing had changed, as if the PSP was still in power. There were too many dead, too many old scores to settle.

“You can’t fight for ever,” Eleanor said, knowing it was a waste of time. Trinities lived for combat, lived for death. It was sequenced into their genes now, unbreakable.

“Try me,” Suzi growled dangerously.

Two guards stood outside the tower’s door, saluting sharply as Suzi walked through. Eleanor didn’t even feel a reflex laugh coming on, it was too sad. The inside of the tower was kept meticulously clean, a sharp contrast to the external atrophy.

Suzi knocked once on the door of the old warden’s flat and went straight in. The far end of the room was lined with dilapidated metal desks supporting a range of communication gear; six Trinities, all girls, were operating the systems. Seven flatscreens were fixed to the wall above them, showing images fed from cameras which had to be perched on the top of the towers. Five of them displayed a panoramic view of Mucklands Wood, scanning slowly; while the remaining two were zoomed in on Walton, two kilometres away on the other side of the Al5, a dense conurbation of rooftops and chimneys, interspaced with the tapering tops of evergreen pines. The quagmire of the Fens basin was just visible in the background, a grubby brown plain vanishing into the distorted haze line which occluded the horizon.

Walton was to the Blackshirts what Mucklands was to the Trinities: headquarters, barracks, recruiting ground, armoury, police and public no-go zone. Both areas were resented by the rest of the city. Even the reserve of gratitude people felt for the Trinities, in their role as focal point for local opposition to the PSP, had withered to nothing over the last four years. Peterborough’s residents wanted the guerrilla war stopped, wanted to be rid of the urban predators, wanted to get on with their lives without the constant threat of violence and anarchy hovering in the background. The city council was already talking of implementing a clampdown, maybe even sending in the army to flush Mucklands and Walton clean of undesirables.

Eleanor knew it would never end that way. You couldn’t drive the Trinities and Blackshirts any further underground.

Long before any clean-out operation finished the bureaucracy-stultified preparation phase the two of them would have it out, head to head, straight on, putting everything they’d got into one final hardline strike.

The communication gear operatives were emitting a constant murmur as they talked into their throat mikes, occasionally switching the flatscreens to different cameras. It looked like a very professional operation.

The instigator of it all sat at a desk behind the operators, command position. Teddy La Croix, an ex-English army sergeant whom the Trinities had named Father, swivelled round in his chair and grinned broadly. He seemed to get bigger each time she met him, easily two metres tall, with at least two-thirds of his bodyweight made up from muscle, probably more, she couldn’t imagine anything as soft and vulnerable as human organs being a part of Teddy’s make up. Biolum light glinted dully on the dark ebony skin of his bald scalp. He was dressed in his usual combat fatigues, cleaned and ironed as though they had only been out of the laundry for an hour.

Boa constrictor arms circled round her, and he gave her a hug, kissing her cheek. “Goddamn, gal, you finally did it, you left him and ran away to me.”

“Stop it,” she giggled and slapped at his shoulder. “I’m legally hitched to him till death do us part, you were at the wedding. So behave yourself.”

He gave a theatrical sigh and put her down. “You’re looking good, Eleanor.”

“Thanks.”

They stood and looked at each other for a long moment. Teddy was one of Greg’s oldest friends; they had both served together back in Thrkey. She had been secretly thrilled at gaining Teddy’s trust; approval like that came hard, but it brought her orbit just that fraction closer to Greg’s.

“What’s that?” She pointed to his left hand. It was covered in a thin flexible foam of blue dermal seal.

“Bit of extra-parliamentary action couple o’ days back. Nothing bad.”

Eleanor heard Suzi’s soft snort. She could guess just how fierce it had been.

“Oh, Teddy.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll be careful.”

“That’ll be the day.”

He put his arm round her shoulder, and walked to the back of the room, away from the communications operators. “Tell me something. You’re here to see Royan, right?”

“Yes.”

“Special visit, coming by yourself. This some sort o’ deal Greg’s working on?” He sat on the edge of a wooden table covered in maps and thick folders, resting his buttocks on the edge. The legs let out little creaks of stress.

“Yes.”

Teddy’s expression turned serious, forbidding. “He’s outta that, gal. He’s got the farm, he’s got you. You got a job now, you gotta keep him out. He’s made it, clean free. Outta all this shit.”

She put a hand on his forearm. “No hardlining, Teddy. I wouldn’t let him do that again, you know I wouldn’t. This is just a case for Julia. It’s puzzling, and it’s ever so slightly bloody weird, but it’s nothing physical. OK?”

Teddy worried at his front teeth with a fingernail. “Julia?”

The tone was indecisive.

“Yes. She needs his espersense.”

“There’s other psychics. This themed shit they’s shovelling out these days.”

“Name one as good as Greg.”

“Yeah,” he growled. “Well, you tell that rich bitch from me, it’s her ass if anything happens to Greg.” His eyebrows lifted in emphasis. “Or you.”

She stood on tiptoes and planted a kiss on his forehead. “You’re gorgeous.”

“Jesus, shit.”

Was he actually blushing?

“What is this flicking case, anyway? Gotta be heavy duty shit for her to ask in the first place. Last time we rapped, she’s as hot as me for Greg to quit.”

“Edward Kitchener. She needs to know who killed him.”

“The physics guy? Why?”

“He was working on something for her.” She put her hands up in surrender. “Don’t ask me what. I don’t understand a word of it.”

“Yeah, well, I can see why you need to rap with Son. Crap like that, right up his alley. Now don’t you go tie up all his capacity, we need him too, more’n ever right now.”

Her lips turned down. “Teddy…”

“No choice, gal.” He waved at the two screens covering Walton. “Fucking Party’s crawling like ants down there. Someone gotta stomp on ‘em. Don’t see no police doing it. Or this new flicking wonder government we got lumbered with. You ask Julia, you don’t believe me. Three o’ her factories hit by thermal bombs this month, not five klicks from here.”