Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“Escape plans,” she snorted in a resigned amusement which nudged disapprobation. “Sure, Greg. Sure.” After a while she asked, “What do you think they want us for?”

“Information. They want to know what we’ve discovered of their operation, how much of that we’ve told Walshaw. Once they know that they’ll see what they can salvage. Hopefully that isn’t going to be much, we’ve done a pretty good job up to now.”

“Great. That makes me feel one hell of a lot better.” She lapsed into sullen silence.

Greg guessed they’d been lying in the blank metal cell for a couple of hours before the hatch swung open.

It was Mark who drew the latches, accompanied by two more of Kendric’s bodyguards. A biolum came on above them. After hours of dusk, the glare sent Greg’s tear ducts into frantic action.

“Still on your backs?” Mark gloated. “I thought I’d he pulling you off each other by now. Or aren’t you up to that? Maybe fancy something different, animals and the like? I heard you gland freaks are kind’ve warped.”

Gabriel glared at him silently, realizing just how nasty things could turn if she started antagonizing him.

Mark bent down and released Greg’s legs with a complex-looking mechanical key.

Greg was jerked roughly to his feet. Every ache and pain suddenly doubled in intensity. His legs nearly collapsed as a wave of nausea hit him. He saw the front of his dress shirt was stained by a long ribbon of dried blood; his nose had been bleeding again while he’d been unconscious.

One of the bodyguards supported him as he stumbled out into the corridor. It didn’t possess anything like the ostentation of the upper decks. Pipes ran along the walls, red letters were stencilled across small hatches. The engine noise was more pronounced.

Another three bodyguards were waiting for him outside. Including Toby, who glowered with unconcealed menace.

“Christ,” Greg croaked. “I must scare you lot shitless.”

“Gonna have you, white boy,” Toby whispered dangerously. “Gonna take you a-fucking-part.”

“Not yet, Toby,” Mark said, pushing a shaky Gabriel ahead of him. “When the Man has finished with him.”

Greg was marched up and out on to the afterdeck. The sun was nearly full overhead. Well over six hours since they’d been snatched from the Duo. Would Walshaw have noticed? He’d told the security chief he would help to analyse the data in the Crays, but he hadn’t given a specific time. Of course, Eleanor would be frantic, but would she ring Walshaw? And even if she did there was nothing to make him look here.

At least he’d been right about ‘here’. The Mirriam was sailing sedately down the Nene.

The course the Nene took for the first thirty kilometres east of Peterborough was a new one, The PSP’s delay in authorizing construction of the city’s port meant that the old river course had been lost at the start of the Warming, disappearing beneath the water and silt which laid siege to the city boundaries. A couple of years later, when the wharves’ foundations were being laid, the dredgers cut a straight line from the port right out to the old estuary at Tydd Gote.

Mirriam was following a huge container freighter out towards the Wash. There was another freighter trailing a couple of kilometres behind. They were the only things moving in a very confined universe. All Greg could see was river, sky, and high gene-tailored coral levees, covered in tall stringy reeds.

The tide was full, just beginning to turn, showing a thin line of chocolate mud below the bottom of the reeds.

Mirriam seemed to be losing ground on the freighter in front. Greg glanced over the taffrail to see four crewmen inflating two odd-looking craft on the edge of the diving platform. They were blunt-nosed dinghies with a couple of simple benches strung between the triplex tubing that formed the sides. A loose surplus of leathery fabric ran round the outside. It was only after a big fan, caged in a protective mesh, hinged up to the vertical at the rear of one of the dinghies that Greg realized they were actually hovercraft.

Gabriel nudged him and he turned to see Kendric approaching. Mirriam’s owner was wearing olive-green track-suit trousers and a light waterproof jacket. Hermione was at his side, as always; dressed in natty designer equivalents of her husband’s attire, But it was the woman keeping a short distance behind who held Greg’s attention.

She was in her late twenties with a second chin just beginning to develop; her dumpy face was framed by straight jet-black hair, cut in a fringe along her eyebrows, falling to her shoulders at the sides. Her skin was dark and leathery, heavily wrinkled from excessive sun exposure.

He was convinced that she was the woman he’d seen at the ambush, He could still see her slightly bulky frame in that trio walking calmly down the road.

Kendric’s gaze swept across Greg and Gabriel, utterly unperturbed. A cattleman checking his stock.

“Put them in with Rod and Laurrie,” Kendric said to Mark, “You and Toby come with us.”

“Yes, sir,” Mark replied.

“Postponed,” Toby muttered in Greg’s ear. “That’s all.”

“Right, get them down there,” Mark was saying.

Kendric and Hermione began to descend the ladder to the diving platform. The crewmen were holding the fully rigged hovercraft steady in Mirriam’s wake.

“You’ll have to take our cuffs off,” Greg pointed out.

“Maybe we’ll just throw you down,” said Toby.

“Take ‘em off,” Mark said. “And you two, don’t think about jumping.”

Greg just managed the climb down the ladder, frightened his weak, trembling hands were going to lose their grip. He flopped down in the bottom of a hovercraft, exhausted and horribly woozy.

Gabriel sat on a bench next to him, breathing heavily. One of the crewmen cuffed them both again.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked, her face anxious.

“Yeah.”

He heard the fan start up, an incessant droning whine. There was a surge of motion, then the deck tilted up as they climbed the levee wall. The dizziness returned.

When they were down the other side, he struggled into a sitting position against the tough plastic of the gunwale, trying to take an interest in the journey. The sour-faced woman was perched on the rear bench, her waterproof zippered up against the occasional scythe of spray. Her hair was blowing about in the slipstream.

One of the Mirriam’s crewmen was up front, steering from behind a little Perspex windshield. A bodyguard was sitting behind him, giving Greg and Gabriel the occasional impersonal glance. At least Toby wasn’t on board. He managed to get his eyes above the gunwale.

It’d taken centuries to drain the original fenland marches and turn them into farmland; generations had laboured to liberate the rich black loam from the water, rewarded with the most fertile soil in Europe. The polar melt drowned them in eighteen months. The Fens basin wasn’t a sea, it was mud, tens of metres thick with a tackiness gradient that varied from a few centimetres of weed-clogged salt water on the surface down to near solid treacle.

An ex-Fenman living in Oakham had once told Greg that it was possible to tell the age of a Fens house by looking at its doorstep. The older it was the more the loam would’ve dried out and contracted beneath it, leaving the doorstep high and dry. Really ancient cottages had a gap below the bottom of the stone and the ground.

Greg couldn’t see any doorsteps; on the few lonely farmhouses still visible he was hard pushed even to see the doors.

Twelve years of sluggish tidal suction had chewed out their foundations, pulling them down into the absorptive alluvial quagmire, Some of the sturdier buildings had managed to retain their shape, upper floors rising out of the brown-glass surface over which the hovercraft were racing. But the majority had subsided into tiny flattened islands, with juncus rushes growing out of the shattered bricks and skeletal timbers. Ragged felt hems of blue-green algae encircled all of them.