Dan Abnett - Border Princes

Gwen thought about that. ‘Pooh,’ she decided. ‘That’s cobblers.’

‘Of course,’ said James. ‘Being positive didn’t work, so I was shooting for negative reinforcement.’

‘You’re a nutjob, is what you are.’

James knelt down by the scanner system’s master unit and pressed some switches. A vague filigree of green light spread out from the tripod-mounted sensors: thin rays they could barely see in the daylight criss-crossed and overlapped like a spirograph pattern.

‘Actually,’ James said, ‘I was only half-kidding. I don’t believe in ghosts. “Ghost” is a word people use to explain things that Torchwood can provide much better, scientific explanations for. But in this instance…’

Gwen narrowed her eyes. ‘Stop it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Saw a ghost once…’

He shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

Gwen got back to business. ‘Getting anything?’

James fiddled with the master control, adjusting wavelengths. ‘Umm… no.’

Gwen’s phone rang. She snatched it out.

‘Hello?’

She heard silence at the other end. Then, the very faintest murmur of something.

‘Hello? Jack?’

The call ended. The phone immediately rang again.

‘Hello?’

‘Gwen?’ It was Jack. His voice sounded thin and very, very far away. Thin, rushing sounds came and went, like gusts of wind. ‘I’ve been trying to get through for ages. Gwen?’

‘I’m here. Are you all right?’

‘I can barely hear you, Gwen. My phone’s on low battery. Can you hear me?’

‘Just.’

‘It’s getting dark, Gwen. Really dark. Nightfall. We’ve gone inside the chapel. Tosh says she can hear noises outside, but I don’t hear anything. She’s telling me she can. Something walking around. Footsteps.’

Static.

‘Jack?’

‘Gwen? Gwen, how are things your end?’

‘We’re… we’re trying to find you, Jack. Hold on.’

‘Battery’s low, Gwen. I-’

Dead.

Gwen looked anxiously at James. He returned her look with one of slight exasperation. ‘I can’t get the system to align properly,’ he said, getting up and walking around the ring of tripods, adjusting each unit in turn. ‘I’m just getting feedback. Interference patterns.’

‘Listen,’ he added, ‘I’m sorry about the roast thing. I didn’t mean to Wooof you out.’

‘What roast thing?’

‘What?’

‘You just said you were sorry about the roast thing,’ Gwen said.

‘I didn’t. I said ghost.’

‘You bloody didn’t.’

James opened his mouth but didn’t answer. He met Gwen’s eyes. They each knew what the other was thinking. They’d been here before.

The pull came on him, without any warning, as it always did.

‘Steady on, mate!’ the traffic warden said. ‘Are you all right?’

The lean man in the black suit had sprung up off the bus stop bench and barged into him.

‘I said, are you all right?’

The man was swaying slightly, glancing around in some confusion. Drugs, thought the traffic warden. The man didn’t look the type — too old, too well dressed — but nobody looked the type any more.

‘Mate?’

The man took a step, halted, looked around again, and met the warden’s eyes.

‘What did you say?’ the man asked.

‘Are you all right? You look a bit spaced.’

‘Alert protocol,’ the man said, as if that explained everything. ‘Threat to the Principal. Jeopardy. Investment is beginning, but the pull is wrong. The pull is wrong.’

‘Ri-ight. Whatever you say, mate. Just mind how you go.’

The man ignored him and began to stride away down the pavement. He bumped into an old woman with a tartan shopping trolley, and then clipped a pushchair with his hip.

The mother gave him what for. The man ignored her too, and moved on, start-stop, a few quick steps, then another bewildered glance around. He changed direction several times.

Definitely drugs, thought the traffic warden, shaking his head. The man was scurrying backwards and forwards, like Jerry Lewis doing his ‘confused’ shtick, except there was a curiously fluid grace to his movements.

Designer drugs, the traffic warden decided. He’d read all about those.

City Road was bustling. Tuesday lunchtime. Bookmakers with coloured-bead door curtains; army surplus stores selling camo-pants and Air-soft guns; slot arcades with doormen; Dragon Burger bars ripe with grease; conga lines of carts outside the Happy Shopper; resigned queues outside the Post Office; bunting-trimmed forecourts of pre-owned cars with stickered windows; hot-dog stands sizzling with onion smoke; bhangra pumping from minicab sound systems; reversing hooters and car alarms; hand car wash and valeting, redolent with pine scent; a council worker in Day-Glo overalls, picking up litter with a squeezy claw and dropping it into his yellow cart; kids with sherbet fountains outside Poundland, laughing at the man by the crosswalk proclaiming Jesus’ constant love to an uninterested crowd; men carrying cue-cases like shouldered arms as they wandered upstairs to the snooker club; double parking; hazard lights ticking; two Somali men arguing in a doorway; chuggers with clipboards asking for just a moment; the stable-smell of straw and pellet food exuding from the pet shop; two women in chadors; Telecom engineers erecting an orange hazard guard around the manhole they are about to lift; someone shouting to get Ronnie’s attention; the pip-pip-pip of the crossing posts; the air-horn of a boy racer’s GTi rendering ‘La Cucaracha’; carentan melons like bald scalps in the fake grass trays of a fruit and veg; people, people, people.

Too many noises, too many smells, too much movement. Too much input. The pull was wrong. The pull was wrong. He couldn’t get a clean fix on the alert. Location? What was the location? How could he respond if he didn’t have a definitive location? The upload was pulsing into him, but it was patchy and contradictory. It pulled him one way, then another, as if it was uncertain, as if it couldn’t make its mind up.

‘Where? Where is it?’ he demanded out loud. Faces in the crowd looked at him, confused, amused, alarmed, but they were just faces and he didn’t care what they thought. Some of them spoke to him, but he didn’t care what they said either.

Where was he needed? Where was the Principal? How could he have lost the fix on the Principal? Why couldn’t he focus? Why was the upload so disjointed? Was it being jammed?

‘Principal,’ Mr Dine muttered. ‘Majesty. Where are you?’

He felt his metabolism start to hike as the alert protocols took full control. His composition altered. He felt a surge as the investment began and power was relayed into him, unsleeving the deep-seated caches in his genes and bone marrow, and lighting up his higher senses. Still no fix. The pull was still wrong. Indecisive.

Turning wildly, he bumped against a news-stand, and a row of magazines slithered off onto the pavement. The vendor started to remonstrate with him.

‘I’m talking to you, twat! Oi!’

No time for an altercation. Mr Dine raised his hand. The vendor jerked backwards into his stand and ended up sitting on a heap of scattered tabloids.

Some of the faces were shouting at him suddenly. What did he think he was doing? Who did he think he was? Jackie flaming Chan?

Mr Dine ignored them. He turned left, then checked himself and turned right instead, stepping off the kerb.

There was a squeal and a crunch. A woman screamed.

The Autospares van, an older, commercial-bodied Escort, had come to a stop so suddenly, its rear end had swung out. The driver’s side door opened, and a chubby man with sweat patches on his beige, short-sleeved shirt got out and stared at Mr Dine, his mouth a goldfish ‘O’.