Gary Gibson - Final Days

Hsingyun paused and suddenly changed direction a couple of times as they moved towards the dome, stopping and walking off briefly to the side before moving forward again. Saul and Jacob took care to follow very closely in his footsteps.

The snow crunched beneath Saul’s boots, the cold quickly finding its way through the soles and numbing his toes. His testicles appeared intent on crawling back inside his body every time he saw a dark shape lodged in the ice directly underfoot, and he shuddered with relief when they finally passed through a door leading into the dome’s interior. The air inside felt so warm and thick by comparison that, for a moment, Saul almost couldn’t breathe.

A railing in the centre of the otherwise empty dome surrounded a spiral staircase leading down through a wide shaft cut into the ice. Saul took a firm grip on his briefcase and followed the other two downwards, the steel treads clanging noisily underfoot as they descended.

The interior of the ice-pharm proved to be almost as enormous as the exterior. Saul saw room after room filled with industrial machinery, tended by workers wearing masks and protective gear. The air was filled with the constant thunder of production. To one side, thick sheets of semi-translucent plastic hung to the floor from ceiling-mounted railings, shielding the dim silhouettes of laboratory equipment. This, then, Saul guessed, was where the analysis and gene-splicing took place. Enormous vats, concealed behind a tangle of pipework, wistsed for the mass synthesis of the pharm’s products, prior to shipping to markets in the Sphere and Coalition territories back home.

Not for the first time, Saul felt the weight of knowing just how staggeringly inadequate the ASI was in the face of such mass industry. This was just one single black pharm, but it was filled with more contraband than Array Security and Immigration might hope to seize in any single year. And there were hundreds of pharms just like it, spread out across Kepler’s vast oceans.

Two heavily armed Tian Di Hui street soldiers, identifiable by their nondescript baggy street clothes – perfect for concealing weapons – were waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Your contact lenses,’ one of them said to Saul in Mandarin. ‘Take them out.’

Saul glanced at Jacob. ‘I won’t be able to understand one damn word they’re saying if I don’t have my contacts,’ he complained.

‘Just do what they say,’ Jacob muttered under his breath, already pinching his own contacts out. ‘They’re obviously not taking any chances on us recording anything. I can translate for you if I have to; my Mandarin’s pretty good.’

Saul muttered under his breath, then tipped his head back and carefully pinched both of his own contacts out. Their embedded circuitry sparkled silver and gold as he placed them into a silver-plated case he kept for the purpose, tucking it into a pocket. Hsingyun did the same, then the second soldier swiped each of them in turn with a wand before finally patting them down.

As Hsingyun addressed the two soldiers in rapid Mandarin, Saul listened to the up-and-down cadences of their dialogue, unable to understand a word without the benefit of auto-translation. He noticed that the walls were sprayed with some kind of insulating plastic presumably intended to keep the pykrete from melting. Indeed, the factory floor was swelteringly hot, and Saul was already starting to sweat by the time he’d pulled his heavy parka off and clasped it under one arm.

‘They want to see inside your briefcase as well,’ Jacob told him.

One of the soldiers waved Saul towards a series of low trestle tables arranged next to a shoulder-high partition that stood to one side of the metal staircase. Saul kept his expression carefully blank as he placed the briefcase flat on a table and lifted the lid, spinning it around so the soldier could see it contained thick bundles of crisp new black-market currency. A small wooden box, painted matte black, sat on top of these bundles.

The street soldier placed the box to one side and riffled through the notes, bundle by bundle, pushing his hands deep inside the case before pointing at the little box and barking something at Saul.

‘He wants to see inside the box,’ explained Jacob.

Saul nodded and opened it up to show the soldier the arbitration unit nestling within, on a bed of foam plastic. Tiny, silver and featureless, it mit easily have been mistaken for a cigarette lighter. The soldier nodded, and Saul placed the box back inside his briefcase, snapping it shut.

Apparently satisfied, the two street soldiers led the way. Hsingyun chatted with them as they proceeded, their words echoing throughout the station’s interior.

They didn’t have far to go. One of the street soldiers opened a door to one side, and Hsingyun led them through. Saul found himself standing just inside a conference room such as one might find in any of New Kaiohsung’s commercial skyscrapers, except that it had no windows. The walls were panelled with strips of accelerated-growth wood, probably grown in another of the ice-pharms.

The two soldiers followed the three of them inside. The room was long and narrow, and had a table, surrounded by several chairs, standing immediately to the right and dominating the nearer half of the room. Further in, two men – one white, one Asian – sat on a couch facing a TriView screen in the far left-hand corner. Beer and wine bottles, in varying stages of emptiness, were piled on a small coffee table to one side of the couch. The room reeked of loup-garou and other substances.

Saul glanced over at the TriView, and saw images of a man in a leather mask torturing a half-naked woman who was chained to a concrete post. She screamed and begged for mercy as her assailant grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head backwards, bringing a live power drill close to her throat. Even from across the room, Saul could see that her movements were a little too stiff to be real. He guessed she was a Japanese torture doll, one of the high-end models marketed to jaded business executives wherever they weren’t banned.

A third man stood immediately to the right of the couch, watching the TriView with a look of weary indifference, his hands pushed into the pockets of a very expensive-looking suit: Shih Hsiu-Chuan himself.

Saul felt a thrill of anticipation. Hsiu-Chuan glanced slowly in his direction, then back at the screen.

Meanwhile, Saul’s pulse rate began to build, riding on a tide of loup-garou as he followed Jacob and Hsingyun further into the room. The insouciant way in which Hsiu-Chuan held himself, together with that distant, mildly bored expression, suggested that their own presence here was a burden he only barely tolerated.

‘Hey!’ said the white man, leaping up from the couch and stepping around behind it to face them. He wore a long woollen jacket over a stained shirt and overalls, a cloth cap pulled down over his ears. ‘I see we have company.’

Hsingyun moved towards him and they exchanged a few words in Mandarin. ‘This is Ben Tanner,’ Hsingyun explained, looking back towards Saul and Jacob. ‘He runs this station.’

Tanner’s oriental TriView buddy now stood up and eyed Saul critically. ‘Nobody told me he was a hei-gui-zi ,’ he remarked in guttural English, also stepping away from the couch.

Even though Saul spoke next to no Mandarin, he knew just enough to recognize the insult.

‘Is that a problem?’ he asked mildly.

‘No problem,’ said Tanner, waving an irritated hand at his companion. Judging by his accent he hailed from the East Coast Republic, maybe New York. He glanced at Saul’s briefcase, still gripped tightly in one hand. ‘And that’s the goods?’

Saul nodded and stepped closer, shaking Tanner’s hand. Hsiu-Chuan gave every impression of ignoring them all, his attention apparently still fixed on the TriView, but Saul wasn’t fooled.