Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘Because?’

‘Because it’ll bring you here. Because here is where the Amok is.’

Silence.

‘Jack, did you-’

‘Hang tight, Gwen,’ Jack said. Over the line, she heard movement, a bump or two. She heard Jack talking to Toshiko, urging her to get up. She heard Toshiko’s frail complaints.

Jack began insisting. Gwen heard Toshiko call him a bad word. More bumps and scrapes, muffled.

‘Gwen?’

‘Yes, hello?’

‘We’re heading for the chapel door. Footsteps or no footsteps, we’re going to do like you suggested. We’re going to give in and-’

‘And?’

‘I dunno, hope for the best? Cross your fingers.’

Gwen wanted to, but in her befuddled state, she couldn’t remember how.

Over the live link, she heard something heavy and wooden scrape back. She heard Jack mumbling to Toshiko. A fragile response.

‘We’re outside,’ Jack said, though not to Gwen. ‘Dang, it’s dark.’

‘Jack? Jack, just follow the call.’

‘Christ almighty!’ James said. ‘Look at this!’

Gwen moved in behind him. She stared over James’s shoulder at the monitor on the master control box, her phone still pressed to her ear.

Something had appeared on the dim screen, like a radar echo, a light-bouncing outline. It was a chapel, except it wasn’t exactly. It was the ghost outline of a chapel, a luminous diagram. Struggling, the ring of scanners were painting something half-solid.

‘Jack? Jack? We can see the shape of the chapel on our system! Jack?’

Jack Harkness said something in reply, but it was too distorted to make sense of. On the monitor, two phantom figures appeared, ephemeral and half-formed. They were stepping out of the outlined chapel’s outlined doorway.

Gwen looked up. In the hard daylight, there was nothing to see inside the ring of mounted scanners.

‘Jack?’

‘They’re coming out,’ James said. ‘I…’

He faltered. He looked up at her, pain lacing his features. ‘Gwen, I feel really sick. I-’

James collapsed on the ground, quivering, his feet kicking.

‘Oh God! Oh Christ! James!’ Gwen exclaimed, bending over him. She tried to hold James’s body steady and hold the phone to her ear at the same time.

James went still. Blood dripped out of his left nostril.

‘Jack?’ she whispered.

‘Gwen? We’re right outside. In the dark. It’s really dark. Are you there?’

‘Yes, Jack. Follow my voice. Scrub that, follow the Amok.’

‘OK.’ Jack sounded like a scared child. It was not a tone she associated with him, nor one she wanted to.

‘Gwen? Gwen, I think it’s here.’

At first, she thought he meant the Amok, but that wasn’t it. Over the open line, she heard the footsteps. They were coming closer, hobnails on loose flags, clack clack clack clack .

Big Wooof . The sound of those footsteps was by far the scariest thing she would ever hear in her life.

Mr Dine vaulted off the burnished roof shell of the Millennium Centre and landed on the dry boards of the Quay below in a single bound.

He landed in a shock-absorbing crouch and slowly rose upright. Combat modulated, flicker-fast, skin-sheathed in battledress, he read the area. Environment appraisal, a super-vast sensory processing that took barely a nanosecond from initial data-capture to final tactical assessment. The gleaming finger of the water tower smelled especially hot to his elevated senses. He shot towards it.

Visitors and tourists milled around the area, all the way down Roald Dahl Plass, chattering in the colourless sunlight and taking pictures. None of them saw him, even though he passed amongst them. None of them recorded him in their pictures, even though he was right there in shot many times.

This was because he was simply moving too fast. Hyper-acceleration zigzagged him in and out of the bustling traffic as if he was occupying an entirely separate time scheme. The people were slo-mo to him, swaying, lumbering, cumbersome. It was also, partly, because he was invested for war, and the matt-grey sleeve of the battledress shrugged off light and colour like smoke.

In extremis, Mr Dine had switched to autonomous running. The upload was conspicuously unreliable, unacceptably compromised, and the fix undefined, so Mr Dine had muted the upload’s data stream. He didn’t need the confusion. For the sake of the Principal, he knew he had to act logically, and make the sort of executive anticipatory decisions all loyal bodyguards of the First Senior were expected to make when it came to the crunch.

This was the crunch. In selecting him, him out of all the exalted First Seniors, for this tour of duty, the Lord of the Border had placed enormous trust in Mr Dine, and Mr Dine wasn’t about to betray that trust. Protect the Principal. Protect the Principal. All other issues were secondary. That was why he had been inserted onto the Earth.

He was buzzing, his body singing with the immense power the investment had bestowed upon him. This was his purpose, in its purest, most ineluctable form, these brief, shining moments of performance. This was the fleeting joy of being what he was, what he had volunteered to be. This was why he had been made the way he was.

A selfless, devoted soldier. An implacable force. An instrument of war. There was nothing on Earth in this time that could match him, like for like. Nothing from Earth, at least.

There were plenty of things from elsewhere that might give cause for concern.

A blink, he arrived beside the base of the water tower. Clear rivulets of water poured down the steel flanks of the naive human monument. Tourists laughed and backed off as the Bayside wind carried the spray out at them. None of them saw him.

None of them except a three-year-old boy, pulling on his mother’s hand as the family posed for a father’s Kodak digital. In Mr Dine’s experience, very young human children sometimes possessed a knack of subtle intuition that adulthood stole away. The boy stared at him, goggle-eyed.

‘Mummy, who is the grey man?’

‘Look at Daddy, Kyle. Look at Daddy and say cheese.’

Mr Dine raised a grey-thorned finger to his lips and winked at the boy. The boy’s eye’s widened further and he grinned.

Mr Dine turned and took a deep breath. He could smell the technology buried under the flagstones. It reeked, hot and sharp, like cooking pheromones. Down below, deep under the Bay, exotic tech screamed to him like a newborn baby.

Autonomous running. Executive decision. Assess the options. Another nanosecond of deep reflection. He had no true fix on the Principal, so he had to work with the data available. If he couldn’t find the Principal himself, he could locate and neutralise that which was threatening the Principal.

The water tower. His systems lit up, hungry.

Here. Here .

There was a lift mechanism under one of the paving stones, cloaked by a perception filter. Interesting. Unexpected. He nodded his head. A simple hindbrain connection with the lift’s systems overwrote all the security measures.

Mr Dine began to descend as the lift kicked in.

He was lowered into a dank, twilight place, a lair of some sort. Gloom, concrete, old tiling, the background smell of the under-dock vault. The sleek flanks of the water tower extended down into the place, down through ground level into a recirculatory basin. Mr Dine tasted the heat of a network of high-level human computational systems and allied electronics: live work stations, woven sheaves of fibre-optic trunking. Very impressive, by local tech standards. Primitive to him.

He also read other things. Dead things, dormant things, slumbering things, dreaming things, things encased and secured and screened and boxed and locked away. A treasure trove of non-human artifice that had no business being either here or now. He approved of the way it had been so diligently sequestered.